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The complete transfer of allthe bores among its guestsfrom its shoulders to ours.

3.

The chronic discontent ofour three maids.

4.

The entire management ofits Workhouse teas.

4.

The utter demoralisation ofour boot-boy.

5.

The wear and tear of mindof all its Christmas-treesand bran-pies.

5.

The acquaintance of severaldamaged fine ladies.

6.

The physicking of its sickdogs.

6.

A roll of red flannel fromthe last wedding.

7.

The setting its canaries'broken legs.

7.

The occasional use of agarden-hose.

8.

The general cheerful andgrateful charing for it.

'There! I do not think that the joys and sorrows of
living in a little house under the shadow of a big one were
ever more lucidly set forth,' says an elder sister, holding
up the slate on which she has just been totting up this
ingenious debit and credit account to a pink junior,[Pg 2]
kneeling, head on hand, beside her; a junior who, not so
long ago, did sums on that very slate, and the straggle of
briony round whose sailor-hat tells that she has only just
left the sunburnt harvest-fields and the overgrown August
hedgerows behind her.

'We have had a good deal of fun out of it too,' says she,
rather remorsefully. 'Do you remember'—with a sigh of
recollected enjoyment—'the day that we all blackened our
faces with soot, and could not get the soot off again
afterwards?'

To what but a mind of seventeen could such a reminiscence
have appeared in the light of a departed joy?

'I have left out an item, I see,' says Margaret, running
her eye once again over her work; 'an unlimited quantity
of the society of Freddy Ducane, when nothing better
turns up for him! Under which head, profit or loss'—glancing
with a not more than semi-amused smile at her
sister—'am I to enter it, eh, Prue?'

'Loss, loss!' replies Prue, with a suspiciously rosy
precipitation. 'No question about it; no one makes us
lose so much time as he! Loss, loss!'

Margaret's eyes rest for an instant on her sister's face,
and then return not quite comfortably to the slate, upon
which she painstakingly inscribes the final entry, 'An
unlimited quantity of Freddy Ducane's society, when
nothing better turns up for him!'

'Dear me!' repeats Prue, under her breath, in a rather
awed voice; 'I wonder what it feels like to be damaged!'

'You had better ask her,' drily.

'I suppose she says dreadful things,' continues the
young girl, still with that same awed curiosity. 'I heard
Mrs. Evans telling you that she "stuck at nothing." I
wonder how she does it.'

'You had better ask her,' more drily.

'Damaged or not damaged,' cries Prue, springing up from
her knees and beginning to caper about the room, and sing
to her own capering, 'we shall meet her to-night—

'"For I'm to be married to-day, to-day, For I'm to be married to-day."

Or if I am not to be married, I am to go to my first
dinner-party, which is a step in the right direction. Do
you remember your first dinner-party, Peggy? How did
you feel? How did you look?'

'I looked very plain, I believe,' replies Peggy sedately.
'At least, I was told so afterwards. I remember that I
felt very swollen. I had a cold, and was shy, and I think
both combined to make me feel swelled.'

'It is a pity that shyness has not the same effect upon
me,' says Prue, stretching out a long girlish arm, whose
thinness is apparent even through its chintz muslin
covering. 'The one thing that would really improve my
appearance'—stopping before the only looking-glass that
the little room boasts, and putting her finger and thumb
in the hollows of cheeks scarcely rounded enough to match
the rest of the pansy-textured child face—'the one thing
that would really improve my appearance would be to
have the mumps.'

Peggy laughs.

'Unberufen! I should catch them, and you cannot say
that they would improve me.'[Pg 4]

'Never mind!' cries Prue, turning away with a joyous
whirl from the mirror. 'I shall do very well. There are
people who admire bones! I shall pass in a crowd.

'"For I'm to be married to-day, to-day, For I'm to be married to-day."'

Her dance and her song have carried her out into the
garden—the small but now opulent garden; and, partly to
look at her, partly to pasture her eyes upon a yet more
admired object, Peggy has followed her as far as to the
French window, and now stands leaning one handsome
shoulder against the door-post, and looking out upon her
kingdom of flowers.

'We owe the Big House one good thing, at all events,'
she says, a smile of satisfaction stealing into her comely
eyes. 'I never knew what peace of mind was until I had
a garden-hose.'

At this moment, in the hands of Jacob the gardener, it
is playing comfortably on the faces of the tea-roses, and a
luxurious drip and patter testify to their appreciation.

Prue has come back panting, and sunk out of breath on
the window-sill. The briony garland has fallen from her
hat, and a little hairy dog is now galloping about the lawn
boastfully with it, his head held very high. Something in
his attitude gets on the nerves of the other animals; for
the parrot, brought out to sun himself upon the sward,
raps out his mysterious marine oath, which he generally
keeps for a crisis; and the white cat forgets herself so far
as to deal him a swingeing box on the ear as he passes her.

'I met the brougham from the Big House as I came up the
lane,' says Prue, trying to cool herself with the inadequate
fan of a small pocket-handkerchief; 'it was on its way back
from the station. How tired those poor horses must be of
the road to the station! It had three people inside it—Lady
Betty, Mr. Harborough, and some third person.'[Pg 5]

'Her maid, probably.'

Prue shakes her head.

'No; the maid followed in a fly with the nurses and
children. Dear me, Peggy, what a number of servants
they take about with them—maid, one; valet, two; footman,
three; two nurses, five!'

'Nurses, five!' repeats Margaret inattentively, not
thinking of what she is saying, and with her eyes still
riveted on the hose; 'surely that is a very unusual number,
isn't it?'

'I could not see the third person distinctly,' continues
Prue narratively; 'but I think it was the man whom Lady
Betty brought with her last year. She seems always to
bring him with her.'

'More shame for her!' replies Peggy severely.

'Mr. Harborough was very fond of him, too,' says Prue
reflectively. 'He called him "John."'

'More fool he!' still severelier; then, with a sudden
and happy change of key, 'That is right, Jacob. Give it
a good souse; it is covered with fly.'

'Do not you wonder what we shall do to-night?' cries
Prue, her mind galloping gaily away from the blackness of
Lady Betty's deeds to the splendid whiteness of her own
immediate prospect. 'Charades? dancing? I prophesy
dancing.'

'"For Willy will dance with Jane,"'

bursting out into song again—

'"And Betty has got her John."'

She breaks off, laughing. Margaret laughs too.

'Betty may have got her John, but I am sure I do not
know who Peggy and Prue will have, unless Freddy can
split himself up into several young gentlemen at once. He
can do most things'—with a touch of bitterness—'possibly
he can do that too.'[Pg 6]

'Or perhaps we shall go out star-gazing in the walled
garden,' interrupts Prue, hurriedly and redly shying away
from the name thus introduced. 'I always think that the
stars look bigger from the walled garden than anywhere
else in the world.'

'Was it there that you and Freddy went to look for
Cassiopeia's Chair?' inquires Peggy drily; 'and were more
than an hour and a half before you could find her?'

'It is so odd that I had never noticed her before,' cries
Prue hastily. 'She is such a queer shape, more like a long
straggling W than a chair.'

'And, after all,' continues Margaret slowly, with an
uneasy smile, and not paying any heed to her sister's
interpolation, 'she turned out to be in the kiosk.'

Prue is silent. The little hairy dog has brought her
ruined garland back to her feet; and, holding it between
his fore-paws, is painstakingly biting off each leaf and
tendril, and strewing them over the close-shaven sward.
The parrot is going to sleep, standing on one leg, and
making a clacking noise with his beak; not a posture that
one would have thought à priori conducive to slumber.

'It was not a place in which one would have expected
to find a large constellation, was it?' asks Peggy, still with
that same rather rueful smile, and stroking her sister's
childish head as she speaks—'the darkest corner of
a kiosk.'

But at that Prue leaps to her feet; and having, in the
twinkling of an eye, twitched the hose out of Jacob's hand,
she points it at her sister.

'Mention the word kiosk once more,' cries she desperately,
and winking away a couple of tears, 'and you
will not have a dry stitch upon you.'

CHAPTER II

Ave Maria! 'tis the hour of dinner, too; and towards
that dinner, about to be spread at the Big House, the
inmates of the little one are hastening on foot through the
park. Brougham have they none; goloshes and a lanthorn
their only substitute. The apricot sunset and the harvest
moon will be their two lanthorns to-night; but upon the
goloshes Peggy has, in the case of her sister, sternly
insisted. Hastening through the park—alternately hastening,
that is to say—and loitering, as Prue's fear of being
too late, and Peggy's better-grounded apprehension of
being too early, get the upper hand.

'How calm you are!' cries the young girl feverishly, as
Margaret stops for a moment to

'Suck the liquid air'

of the ripe harvest evening, and admire the velvet-coated
stags springing through the bracken. 'How can you be
so calm? Were you calm at your first dinner-party?'

'Do not you think that we might go on now?' asks
Prue, anxiously kicking one golosh against the other.
'We cannot be much too soon; our clocks are always slow.[Pg 8]
It would be awkward, would not it, if we sailed in last
of all?'

Though inwardly convinced that there is very little fear
of this catastrophe, Peggy good-humouredly complies; and
still more good-humouredly refrains from any 'told-you-so'
observation upon their finding themselves sole occupants
of the flamboyant Louis Quatorze chairs and Gobelin sofas
in the large drawing-room, where the housemaids have
evidently only just ceased patting cushions and replacing
chair-backs.

'Never mind!' says Prue joyfully; 'we shall have all
the more of it, and we shall see everybody come in. I
shall love to see everybody come in. Who will be first?
Guess! Not Lady Betty! she will be last. I remember
your saying last year that she was always late, and that
she never apologised.'

'That was very ill bred of her,' replies Margaret
austerely.

'And that one night Mr. Harborough scolded her, and
you saw her making a face at him behind his back. Oh!
how I wish'—breaking out into delighted laughter—'that
she would make a face at him to-night, and that he could
catch her doing it!'

Her laughter is checked by the thrilling sound of the
folding-doors being rolled back to admit some new arrivals.
It is nobody very exciting, however; only Mr. Evans, the
clergyman of the parish, whom they see every day, and
that household angel of his, upon whose testimony lies the
weight of Lady Betty Harborough's conversational laxities.

A stranger would be thunderstruck to hear that Mrs.
Evans is in her wedding-dress, as the sable rook is less
black from head to heel than she; but to those who know
and love her, it is le secret de Polichinelle that her gown—through
having since taken an insignificant trip or two to
the dye-pot, and been eked out with a selection of funeral[Pg 9]
scarves and hat-bands—is verily and indeed the one in
which she stood in virgin modesty beside Mr. Evans at the
altar, fifteen rolling years ago. During a transition stage
of red, it has visited the Infirmary Ball for five years; it
had an unpopular interval of snuffy-brown, during which it
did nothing remarkable; and in its present inky phase it
has mourned for several dead Evanses, and for every
crowned head in Europe.

'I am so glad we are not last,' says Mrs. Evans, relaxing
her entrance smile, and sinking into an easy conversational
manner, as she sees that she has only her two young
parishioners to accost; 'not that there is ever much fear of
that in this house, but Mr. Evans could not get the horse
along. Have you any idea'—looking curiously round—'whom
we are to meet? Lady Roupell's note merely said,
"Dear Mrs. Evans," or "My dear Mrs. Evans"—I forget
which—"will you and Mr. Evans come and help us to eat
a haunch of venison?" She knows that Mr. Evans would
go any distance for a haunch of venison.'

To this somewhat extravagant statement of his appreciation
of the pleasures of the table the pastor is heard to
make a captious demurrer; but his wife goes on without
heeding him.

'Of course that gave one no clue. I think people ought
to give one some clue that one may know what to put on.
However, I thought I could not go far wrong in black;
never too smart, and always smart enough, you know.'

Peggy assents, and, as she does so, a trivial unbelieving
wonder crosses her mind as to what the alternative 'toilette,'
which Mrs. Evans implies, but upon which the eye of man
has never looked, may be.

'And you are no wiser than we?' pursues the vicar's
wife interrogatively. 'I wonder at that, living so near as
you do. Have not you heard of anybody at all?' with
a rather discouraged intonation.[Pg 10]

'I am not sure—I think—the Harboroughs——'

'The Harboroughs?' cries the other eagerly. 'Mr. and
Lady Betty? Her father died last winter; he was the
second duke; succeeded by his eldest son, her brother.
The Harboroughs!—and Mr. Talbot, of course?' with a
knowing look.

But her sentence dies unfinished, killed by the frou-frou
of silk that announces the approach of a smart woman, and
of the white-waistcoated gentleman who has bought the
privilege of paying for the silk. Then follows an unencumbered
man, whose speech bewrayeth him to be a diplomate,
and who has a great deal to say to the smart woman.

After five minutes more frou-frou is audible, heralding
the approach of a second smart woman—Lady Betty herself
this time—with her lawful Harborough stepping somewhat
insignificantly behind her.

Lady Betty is so exceedingly glad to see the two girls
that Peggy asks herself whether her memory has played
her false as to the amount of intimacy that existed between
them last year. She has not overheard the aside that
passed between her ladyship and her husband as she sailed
up the long room:

'Who are they? Have we ever met them here before?
Are they all one lot?'

Nor, indeed, would it ever have entered into the guileless
Peggy's mind as possible that a woman who took her by
both hands, and smiled into both eyes, could have clean
forgotten, not only her name, but her very existence.

Once more the folding-doors roll wide, to admit this time,
at last, the hostess, Lady Roupell, and her nephew, Freddy
Ducane, who—both chronically late for everything—arrive[Pg 11]
simultaneously; the one still fastening his sleeve-link, and
the other hastily clasping her bracelets.

'I beg you all a thousand pardons, good people,' cries
the old lady, going round and dealing out hearty handshakes
to her injured guests. 'I am sure you must all
have been blessing me; but if you had seen me five minutes
ago, you would wonder that I am here now—ha! ha!
Well, at all events we are all assembled at last, are not we?
No! Surely we are short of somebody; who is it? John
Talbot, of course! Where is John Talbot?' looking round,
first at the general company, who are quite unable to
answer her; and turning, secondly, as if involuntarily,
towards Lady Betty. 'Where is John Talbot?'

But at this instant, in time to save Lady Betty's blushes,
which indeed are in no great hurry to show themselves,
John Talbot appears to answer for himself—John Talbot,
the third occupant of the brougham, the 'man whom Lady
Betty always takes about with her.'

His entry is not quite what is expected, as he enters by
no means alone. Clasped in his embrace, with her fat arms
fastened round his neck, and her face buried—a good deal
to its detriment—in his collar, is a young person in her
nightgown; while running by his side is a little barefoot
gentleman, with a long dressing-gown trailing behind him.

'We hope that you will forgive us,' says the young man,
advancing towards his hostess; 'but we have come to say
good-night. I suggested that our costume was not quite
what is usual, but I was overruled.'

As he speaks his fair burden makes it clear by a wriggling
movement that she wishes to be set down; and, being
obliged in this particular, instantly makes for her mother,
and, climbing up into Lady Betty's splendid lap, begins to
whisper in her ear. The boy stands shamefaced, clutching
his protector's hand, and evidently painfully conscious that no
other gentleman but himself in the room is in a dressing-gown.[Pg 12]

'Do you know what she is asking me?' cries Lady Betty,
bursting into a fit of laughter. 'Freddy, I must congratulate
you upon a new bonne fortune. She is asking whether she
may kiss Freddy Ducane! There, be off with you! Since'—with
a look of casual careless coquetry at Talbot—'you
have introduced my family, perhaps you will be good enough
to remove them.'

Mr. Talbot complies; and, having recaptured Miss
Harborough—a feat of some difficulty, as, unlike her brother,
she enjoys her déshabillé, and announces a loud intention of
kissing everybody—departs in the same order in which he
arrived, and the pretty little couple are seen no more.

CHAPTER III

It is obvious that, whatever else he may be, John Talbot
is, with the exception of Mr. Evans, the man of smallest
rank in the room, since to him is assigned the honour of
leading Peggy into the dining-room. She had not at all
anticipated it; but had somehow expected fully to see him,
in defiance of precedence, bearing off his Betty. Nor is
she by any means more pleased at, than prepared for, the
provision made for her entertainment. John Talbot, the
man whose name she has never heard except in connection
with that of another man's wife! John Talbot, 'the man
whom Lady Betty always takes about with her!' In
Heaven's name, why does not she take him about with
her now, and not devolve the onus of his entertainment
upon other innocent and unwilling persons?

With thoughts such as these, that augur but ill for the
amusingness of his dinner, running through her mind,
Margaret lays her hand as lightly as it is possible to do,
without absolutely not touching it, upon the coat-sleeve
presented to her, and marches silently by its side into the
dining-room, inwardly resolving to be as laconic, as forbidding,
and as unlike Lady Betty to its owner as politeness
towards her hostess will allow, and to devote as nearly as
possible the whole of her conversation to her neighbour on
the other side. Nor does her resolution flinch, even when
that other neighbour reveals himself as Mr. Evans. It is
certain that no duty compels her to take the initiative.[Pg 14]
Until John Talbot begins, she may preserve that silence
which she would like to maintain intact, until she rises
from the feast to which she has but just sat down. Doubtlessly
he is of the same mind as she; and, maddened by
separation from his idol, irritated against her, who, for
even an hour, has taken that idol's place, he will ask
nothing better than to sit mute in resentful pining for
her, from whom Lady Roupell has so inhumanly parted
him. As to his intentions to be mute, she is soon undeceived;
for she has not yet finished unbuttoning her
gloves when she finds herself addressed by him.

'I think I had the pleasure of meeting you here last
year?'

Nothing can be more banal than the observation; more
serenely civil, less maddened than the tone in which it is
conveyed. He is not going to leave her in peace then?
She is so surprised and annoyed at this discovery that for
a moment she forgets to answer him. It is not until reminded
of her omission by an expectant look on his face
that she recollects to drop a curt 'Yes.'

'I came'—thinking from her manner that the incident
has escaped her memory, and that he will recall it by becoming
more circumstantial—'I came with the Harboroughs.'

Another 'Yes,' still more curt and bald than the last.
H'm! not flattering for him, certainly; but she has obviously
not yet overtaken the reminiscence.

'It was about this time of year.'

'Yes.'

What is the matter with the girl? there is certainly
something very odd about her. He has noticed her but cursorily
so far, but now gives her an attentively examining
look. She appears to be perfectly sane, and not in the
least shy. Is that handsome mouth, fresh and well cut,
absolutely incapable of framing any syllable but 'Yes'?
He gives himself some little trouble so to compose his[Pg 15]
next question that the answer, 'Yes,' to it shall be impossible.

'Do you happen to recollect whether it was this month
or September? Lady Betty Harborough and I had an
argument about it as we came up from the station.'

Lady Betty Harborough! With what a brazen front he
himself has introduced her! She, Peggy, would as soon
have thought of flying in the air as of mentioning that
name which he has just so matter-of-factly pronounced.

'I am afraid that I do not remember,' she answers
frostily.

He looks at her again, in growing wonder. What does
ail her? Is it, after all, a mysterious form of shyness? He
knows under how many odd disguises that strange malady
of civilisation hides itself. Despite his thirty-two years,
is not he shy himself sometimes? Poor girl, he can feel
for her!

'Not only did we meet here,' pursues he, with a pleasant
friendly smile, 'but Lady Roupell was good enough to take
me down to call upon you at your own house.'

'Yes?'

Well, it is uphill work! If he has to labour at the oar
like this from now until dessert, there will not be much
left of him at the end. Well, never mind! it is all in the
day's work; only he will ask Lady Roupell quietly not to
inflict this impossible dummy upon him again.

'We came down upon you in great force, I remember—it
was on a Sunday—Lady Roupell, Freddy, the Bentincks,
the Harboroughs.'

He pauses, discouraged, despite himself. She has been
leisurely sipping her soup, and now lays down her spoon,
looking straight before her. He heaves a loud sigh, but
not even that induces her to look round at him.

'Lady Roupell often brings people down on Sunday
afternoons,' she says, in an indifferent voice, which implies[Pg 16]
that it is a quite impossible feat for her memory to
separate the one insignificant Sunday to which he alludes
from all or any others. In point of fact, she remembers
it perfectly, and the recollection of it adds a double chill
to her tone.

On that very Sunday afternoon did not this man and
his Lady Betty flagrantly lose themselves for an hour in an
orchard six yards square? Did not Lady Betty, without
leave asked or given, eat all the mulberries that were ripe
on Peggy's one tree? Did not she, in rude horse-play
pelting a foolish guardsman with green apples, break a
bell-glass that sheltered the picotee cuttings cherished of
Jacob's and of Peggy's souls?

Ignorant of the offensive reminiscences he has stirred up,
Mr. Talbot blunders on:

'I remember you had a tame——'

He stops. He cannot for the life of him recollect what
the tame animal was that he was taken to see. He can
only recall that it was some beast not usually kept as a pet,
and that it lived in a house in the stable-yard. Of course
if he pauses she will supply the word, and his lapse of
memory need never be perceived.

But he has reckoned without his host. She has indeed
turned her face a little towards him, and says 'Yes?'
expectantly.

It is clear that she has not the least intention of helping
him; and is it, or is it not, his fancy that there is a slight
ill-natured tremor about that corner of her mouth which is
nearest him?

'A tame—badger,' suggests he desperately.

But the moment that he has uttered the word he knows
that it was not a badger.

'A tame badger!' repeats she slowly, and again gazing
straight before her; 'yes, what a nice pet!'

She is not shy at all, nor even stupid. She is only rude[Pg 17]
and malevolent. But he will not give her the satisfaction
of letting her see that he perceives it.

'Perhaps Lady Roupell will have your permission to
bring us down to see you next Sunday, when I may have
an opportunity of stroking my old friend the badger's' (he
smiles, as if he had known all along that it was not a
badger) 'head once again.'

'I do not know what Lady Roupell's plans for next
Sunday are,' replies she snubbingly; and so turns, with a
decided movement of head and shoulder, towards her other
neighbour, Mr. Evans, who, however, is not nearly so
grateful for her attentions as he should be.

Mr. Evans has the poor and Peggy Lambton always
with him, but he has not a haunch of fat buck-venison
more than three times a year. In everyday life he is
more than willing to give his share of the Vicarage dinner
to such among the sick and afflicted of his flock as can be
consoled and supported by underdone shoulders of mutton
and batter-puddings; but on the rare occasions when the
opportunity offers of having his palate titillated by the
delicate cates of the higher civilisation, he had very much
rather be left in peace to enjoy them. He has no fault
to find in this respect with Prue Lambton, to whom, as
having taken her in to dinner, he might be supposed to
have some conversational obligations.

Why, then, cannot Peggy, to whom he owes nothing, be
equally considerate? Perhaps Peggy's heart speaks for
him. At all events, after one or two vain shots at the
harvest-home and the Workhouse tea, she desists from the
futile effort to lead him into chat; but subtly remains
sitting half turned towards him, as if talking to him, so as
to baffle any further ventures—if, indeed, he have the
spirit to make such—on the part of her other neighbour.
Her tongue being idle, she allows her eyes to travel. It is
true that the thick forest of oats and poppies which waves[Pg 18]
over the board renders the sight of the table's other side
about as difficult as that of the coast of France; but at
least she can see her fat hostess at the head of the table,
and her slim host at the foot. Freddy Ducane is in his
glory—something fair and female on either hand. On his
right Lady Betty, who, being a duke's daughter, takes
precedence of the other smart woman, who was only a miss
before she blossomed into a viscountess; on his left, to
ensure himself against the least risk of having any dull or
vacuous moments during his dinner, he has arranged Prue
Lambton—'his little friend Prue.' Beyond the mere fact
of proximity—in itself, of course, a splendid boon—she
does not, so far, seem to be much the gainer by her position.

However, he snatches a moment every now and then to
explain to her—Peggy knows it as well as if she heard his
words—how entirely a matter of irksome duty and hospitality
are his whispers to Lady Betty, his tender comments
upon her clothes, and long bunglings with the clasp of her
pearls. And, judging by her red-stained cheeks, her empty
plate (which of us in his day has not been too superbly
happy to eat?), and the trembling smiles that rush out to
meet his lame explanations, Prue believes him. Poor little
Prue!

Margaret sighs sadly and impatiently, and looks away—looks
away to find John Talbot's eyes fastened upon her
with an expression of such innocent and genuine curiosity
that she asks involuntarily:

'Why do you look at me?'

'I beg your pardon a thousand times!' he answers
apologetically. 'I was only wondering, to be quite sincere—by
the bye, do you like people to be quite sincere?'

'That depends,' replies Peggy cautiously.

'Well, then, I must risk it. I was wondering why on
earth you had thought it worth your while to snub me in
the way you have been doing.'[Pg 19]

She does not answer, but again looks straight before her.

How very offensive in a woman to look straight before
her! She ought to be quite certain of the perfection of
her profile before she presents it so persistently to you.

Shall he tell her so? That would make her look round
pretty quickly.

'I was trying to see whether I could not regard it in
the light of a compliment,' continues he audaciously.

'That would not be easy,' replies she drily.

'It was something that you should have thought me
worth wasting your powder and shot upon,' he answers.

Certainly her profile is anything but perfect; her chin
projects too much. In her old age, if she had a hook nose
(which she has not), she would be a mere nut-cracker.

Shall he tell her that? How many disagreeable things
he might tell her! It puts him into quite a good humour
with her to think of them.

'Now, about that badger, for instance,' says he.

But at that, against her will, she laughs outright.

'Dear little beast!' she cries maliciously; 'so playful
and affectionate! such a pet!'

She has laughed. That is something gained, at all
events. It is not a nice friendly laugh. On the contrary,
it is a very rude, ill-natured one: she is obviously a rude,
ill-natured girl; but it is a laugh.

'You can see for yourself,' pursues he, holding out one
of the menus for her inspection, 'that we are only at the
first entrée; we shall have to sit beside each other for a
good hour more. Lady Roupell does not want to talk to
me; and your neighbour—I do not know who he is, and I
will not ask you, because I know you would not answer
me civilly—but whoever he is, he will not talk to you. I
saw you try to make him, and he would not; he snubbed
you. I was avenged! I was very glad!'

Peggy would much rather not have laughed; but there[Pg 20]
is something that seems to her so ludicrous in the fact of
her abortive advances to Mr. Evans having been overheard
and triumphed at, that she cannot help yielding to a brief
and stifled mirth at her own expense. And, after all, what
he says is sense. He is a very bad man, and she dislikes
him extremely; but to let him observe to her that the
news from Afghanistan seems warlike; or to remark in
return that she has never seen the root-crops look better,
need not in the least detract from the thoroughness of her
ill opinion of him, and may make the ensuing hour a shade
less tedious to herself than would entire silence. So she
turns her candid eyes, severely, serenely blue, for the first
time, full upon him, and says:

'I think you are right; I think we had better talk.'

But of course, at that sudden permission to talk, every
possible topic of conversation flies out of his head. And
yet as she remains, with her two blue eyes sternly fixed
upon him, awaiting the question or questions that she has
given him permission to put, he must say something; so
he asks stupidly:

'Who is your neighbour?'

'Our vicar.'

'What is his name?' (How infinitely little he cares
what the vicar's name is; but it gives him time.)

'E V A N S,' replies she, spelling very distinctly and
slowly, afraid that she may be overheard if she pronounce
the whole name.

'She is Mrs. Evans; but she is not in mourning; she is
in her wedding-gown!' replies Peggy, breaking into a smile.

She never can help smiling at the thought of Mrs. Evans's
wedding-dress, any more than Charles Lamb's Cheshire cats
can help laughing when they think of Cheshire being a
County Palatine. She is smiling broadly now. Well, if[Pg 21]
her smile come seldom, there is no doubt that it is a very
agreeable one when it does come. What sort of thing
could he say that would be likely to bring it back?

'I did not know that people were ever married in black.'

She shakes her head oracularly.

'No more they are!'

She is smiling still. (What a delightful wide mouth!
and what dents de jeune chien!)

'It is made out of an old Geneva gown of his?' suggests
Talbot wildly.

Again she shakes her nut-brown head.

'Wrong.'

'I have it!' he cries eagerly. 'I know more about the
subject than you think; it has been dyed.'

The mirth has retired from her mouth, and now lurks
in the tail of her bright eye.

'You did not find that out for yourself,' she says
distrustfully; 'some one told you.'

'Upon my honour, it is my own unassisted discovery,'
replies he solemnly, and then they both laugh.

Finding herself betrayed into such a harmony of light-hearted
merriment with him, Margaret pulls herself up.
After all, she must not forget that there is a medium
between the stiff politeness she had planned and this
hail-fellow-well-met-ness into which she finds herself
somehow sliding. Nor does his next sentence, though
innocently enough meant, at all conduce to make her again
relax her austerity.

'I should not allow my wife to dye her wedding-gown
black.'

His wife! How dare he allude to such a person? He,
with his illegal Betty ogling and double-entendre-ing and
posturing opposite! How dare he allude to marriage at
all? He to whom that sacred tie is a derision! She has
frozen up again.[Pg 22]

Without having the faintest suspicion of the cause, he
is wonderingly aware of the result. Is it possible that she
can object to his introducing his hypothetical wife into the
consideration? She is more than welcome to retort upon
him with her supposititious husband. He will give her the
chance.

'Would you?'

'Would I what?'

'Dye your wedding-gown black?'

She knows that she would not. She knows that she
would lay it up in lavender, and tenderly show the yellowed
skirt and outlandish sleeves to her grandchildren forty
years hence. But in the pleasure of contradicting him,
truth is worsted.

'Yes.'

'You would?' in a tone of surprise.

She must repeat her fib.

'Yes.'

'Well, I should not have thought it.'

He would like her to ask him why he would not have
thought it; but she does not oblige him.

'I think it would show a want of sentiment,' pursues he
perseveringly.

'Yes?'

Good heavens! If she has not got back again to her
monosyllable!

'Do not you?'

'No.'

'I should think it would bring ill-luck, should not you?'

'No.'

'Should not you, really?'

'I do not think that it is worth arguing about,' replies
Peggy, roused and wearied. 'I may dye mine, and you
need not dye yours, and we shall neither of us be any the
worse.'[Pg 23]

'And yet——' he begins; but she interrupts him.

'After all,' she says, turning once more upon him those
two dreadfully direct blue eyes—'after all, I am not at all
sure that it is not a good emblem of marriage—the white
gown that goes through muddy waters, and comes out
black on the other side.'

There is such a weight of meaning and emphasis in her
words that he is silent, and wishes that she had kept to
her monosyllables.

CHAPTER IV

'Yon meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes, More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies, What are you when the moon shall rise?'

'Oh, Peggy! I have had such a dinner!' cries Prue,
in an ecstatic voice, drawing her sister away into a
window as soon as the ladies have reached the drawing-room.

'Have you indeed?' replies Margaret distrustfully, and
wilfully misunderstanding. 'Had you two helps of venison,
like Mr. Evans?'

'Oh! I am not talking of the food!' rejoins the other
impatiently. 'I do not know whether or not I ate
anything; I do not think I did. But they were so
amusing, I did not want to talk. He saw that I did not
want to talk, so he let me sit and listen.'

'That was very considerate of him.'

'She was so amusing; she told us such funny stories
about Mr. Harborough—no harm, you know, but rather
making game of him. I do not know what Mrs. Evans
meant by saying that she stuck at nothing. She said one
or two things that I did not quite understand; but I am
sure there was no harm in them.'

'Perhaps not.'

'And she was so kind to me,' pursues Prue, with[Pg 25]
enthusiasm; 'trying to draw me into the conversation,
asking how long I had been out.'

But here the sisters' tête-à-tête is broken in upon by the
high-pitched voice of the subject of their conversation.

'Who would like to come and see my children in bed?
Do not all speak at once. H'm! nobody? This is hardly
gratifying to a mother's feelings. Miss Lambton, I am
sure you will come; you look as if you were fond of children.
And you, Miss Prue, I shall insist upon your coming,
whether you like it or not!'

So saying she puts her hand familiarly through the
delighted little girl's arm, and walks off with her, Peggy
following grudgingly. She has not the slightest desire to
see the young Harboroughs, asleep or wake; though she
has already had to defend her heart against an inclination
to grow warm towards them, upon their rosy nightgowned
entry before dinner. She has to defend it still more
strongly, when, the nursery being reached, she sees them
lying in the all-gentleness of perfect slumber in their cribs.
Even that not innumerous class who dislike the waking
child, the self-assertive, interrogative, climbing, bawling,
smashing, waking child, grow soft-hearted at the sight of
the little sleeping angel. Is this really Lady Betty bending
over the little bed? recovering the outflung chubby arm
from fear of cold, straightening the coverlets, and laying
a light hand on the cool forehead? Peggy ought to be
pleased by such a sign of grace; but when we have formed
a conception of a person we are seldom quite pleased by
the discovery of a fact that declines to square with that
conception.

'You are very fond of them?' she says in a whisper,
that, without her intending it, is interrogative; and through
which pierces perhaps a tone of more surprise than she is
herself aware of.

'Fond of them! Why, I am a perfect fool about them;
at least I am about him! I do not care so much about
her; she is a thorough Harborough! Did you ever see
such a likeness as hers to her father? He' (with a regretful
motion of the head toward the boy's bed) 'is a little
like him too; but he has a strong look of me. When his
eyes are open he is the image of me. I have a good mind
to wake him to show you.'

'Oh, do not!' cries Margaret eagerly; 'it would be
a sin!'

But the caution is needless. The mother had no real
thought of breaking in upon that lovely slumber.

'Did you ever see such a duck?' says she rapturously,
stooping over him; 'and his hand!'—taking the little
plump fist softly into her own palm—'look at his hand!
Will not he be a fine strong man? He can pummel his
nurse already, cannot he, Harris? And not a day's illness
in all his little life, bless him!'

Her eyes are almost moist as she speaks. The colour
would no doubt come and go in her cheeks, only that
unfortunately it has contracted the habit of never going,
unless washed off by eau-de-Cologne. Against her will,
Peggy feels her ill opinion melting away like mist; but
happily, on her return to the drawing-room, she is able to
restore it in its entirety. For no sooner have the men
appeared than Lady Betty disappears. The exact moment
of her flight and its companion Peggy has been unable to
verify; as, at the moment when it must have taken place,
she was buttonholed by Mrs. Evans on the subject of rose-rash,
an unhandsome little disorder at present rioting
among the Evans's ranks; and for which Peggy is supposed
to have a specific. But though she did not actually see the
person who shared Lady Betty's evasion, she is as sure as
to who it was as if her very bodily eyes had looked upon
him,—John Talbot, of course. With John Talbot she is[Pg 27]
now dishonestly philandering under the honest harvest-moon;
to John Talbot she is now talking criminal nonsense,
with those very lips that five minutes ago were laid
upon the sacred velvet cheeks of her little children. With
a curling lip Margaret looks round the room.

Why, Prue is missing too, and Freddy! Prue, the
prone to quinsy, to throats, to delicacy of all kinds, straying
over the deep-dewed grass without cloak or goloshes! For
it would be expecting something more than human of her
to suppose that when invited out by her admirer to hear
all that the poets have said of Orion and Arcturus and the
sister Pleiads, she should stop him in the full flow of his
inspiration to inquire after what the Americans prettily
call her 'gums.' If she will only have the sense to keep to
the gravel paths! The elder sister has walked to the
window, and now stands straining her eyes down the long
alley to see if she can catch any glimpse of the little figure
that, since its wailing infancy seventeen years ago, has
caused her so many anxious hours. Shall she take upon
herself the invidious office of spy, and follow her? or trust
to the child's common sense, and to the possibility of her
occasionally dropping her eyes from the enormous moon,
now queening it in a great field of radiance above her head,
to her own thin-shod feet? She is still hesitating when a
voice, coming from behind her, makes her start.

'What a night!'

She turns to find that the utterer of this original ejaculation
is none other than John Talbot. Is it possible that
they have already returned from their lovers' ramble? But
no! there is no sign of Lady Betty. It is clear that he
could not have been the companion of her stroll. For the
second time this evening Margaret has found herself in
error.

A moment's silence. Whom then could she have lured
into her toils? Freddy? But Freddy must be with Prue.
Mr. Evans? the diplomate? There is not much choice.

Her speculations are again broken in upon by the voice:

'Will not you take a turn?'

'I think not; that is to say'—correcting herself—'I
shall only go a few steps, just to find my sister.'

'May I help you to find her?'

'I do not know why I should give you that trouble.'

A moment's silence, spent by both in reflections. This
is the outcome of his.

'I do not think that I have done anything fresh.'

'Anything fresh?'

'Not since we parted; nothing to earn me a new set of
snubs.'

She smiles a little. 'You have not had much time.'

'And I will not do anything fresh.' Then aside, 'I am
blessed if I know what I did.'

'That is rather a rash engagement,' smiling again.

It is fortunate that her teeth are so good, for she shows
a great many of them.

'But if I keep it I may come?' pertinaciously.

'I suppose so;' and out they step together.

It cannot be helped, but it is a little perverse of fate
that, after all, it should be she who, in appearance at least,
is the one to philander in the moonlight with this despiser
of the marriage law. And whether or no it is his presence
that brings her ill-luck, it is some time before she succeeds
in the object of her search. The grounds are rather large,
with meandering walks and great clumps of shrubs that
hide them from one another.

Each of Prue's favourite resorts has been visited, but
without result. The walled garden, hushed and sleeping;[Pg 29]
the trellised wall, where ancient brick has disappeared
beneath the thronged faces, diversely dazzling, of the
brown, orange, tawny and sulphur nasturtiums; the retired
seat beneath the tulip-tree. All, all are empty. Nothing
remains but the kiosk, and Peggy feels sure that Prue is
not in the kiosk.

Thither, however, they bend their steps; but before they
reach it a turn of the walk reveals to them two seated
figures. One is certainly the Prue whom they seek; Prue
sitting upon an uncomfortable garden bench, on which
nobody ever sits—on which she herself has never sat
before. But is it conceivable that, since dinner, Freddy
can have doubled in size, can have lost all the hair off the
top of his head, and have exchanged his cambric shirt-front
and his diamond and turquoise studs for a double-breasted
waistcoat buttoned to the chin?

With a feeling akin to stupefaction Peggy realises that
it is Mr. Evans, and not Freddy, who is Prue's companion.
As they approach he rises reluctantly. He had much
rather that they had not come. Prue never wants to talk
to him. She lets him sit and silently ruminate and dream
beside her; a cigarette between his lips, and a blessed
oblivion of dissenters, boys' schooling, girls' ugly faces,
rickety baby, Christmas bills, invading his lulled brain.
Prue neither rises nor changes her position. Her arms lie
listlessly on her lap, and she is staring up at Cassiopeia,
the one constellation for ever exalted above its fellows by
having had Freddy Ducane for its exhibitor.

'Do you think you are quite wise to sit out here, with
nothing over your shoulders?' asks Margaret, stooping over
her sister, and speaking in a tone of such exceeding gentleness
as positively to astound Talbot, who had not calculated
upon the existence of such tones in a voice which has
conscientiously employed only its harsher keys for his
benefit.[Pg 30]

'I am not cold,' replies Prue dully.

'How long have you been here? Long?'

'I do not know.'

'We were too comfortable to take note of time, were
not we, Miss Prue?' says Mr. Evans, with a sigh for his
lost peace. 'A southern moon, is not it?' to Talbot.

'Quite long enough, I am sure,' rejoined Peggy, putting
her hand persuasively on her sister's shoulder. 'Come
with us! come!'

Talbot cannot help hearing that 'Come!' even while
exchanging original remarks upon the stars of the southern
hemisphere with the vicar; nor can he further help speculating
as to whether, if that 'Come!' were addressed to
himself, and were inviting him to follow it to Lapland, to
Hong Kong, or to some yet hotter place, he should have
the force of mind to decline. But at all events Prue has.

There is nothing for it but to comply. With a heavier
heart than that with which she reached it, Margaret leaves
the bench and its ill-sorted occupants. She takes little
heed as to the direction of her steps until she finds herself
and her companion approaching the kiosk, whence is plainly
audible the sound of voices, which, as they advance nearer
to it, grows hushed. It is too dark to see into the interior,
as above the little gimcrack temple, memorial of the bad
taste of fifty years ago, rises a brotherhood of tall, spruce
firs that project their shade over and before it.

Just in front of it Talbot stops her to point out to her a
shooting-star that is darting its trail of glory through the
immensities of space. Has he not heard those voices—he
must have been deaf if he did not—nor observed that
[Pg 31]marked succeeding silence? He shows no sign of uneasinessor curiosity. His eye is resting apparently, with a
calmer enjoyment than she can bring to it, on the gold
mist rolling its gauzy-billows in the hollows of the park.

It is only to those who come to her with a tranquil and
disengaged mind that the great mother gives the real key
of her treasure-houses; and Peggy's mind to-night is too
ruffled to give her any claim to the great endowment.

They are standing silently side by side, when a noise,
proceeding from the inside of the kiosk, makes itself
audible—a noise apparently intended to counterfeit the
mewing of a cat, followed by the crowing of a most improbable
cock.

Talbot does not even turn his head.

'We are not at all frightened, and not much amused,'
he says, in a clear matter-of-fact voice.

'You had not an idea that we were here, had you?'
cries Lady Betty, springing out of the temple, followed by
Freddy Ducane. 'Did not I mew well? and did not
Freddy crow badly? Freddy, you have no more idea of
crowing than a carp.'

'I can do better than that,' replies Freddy, in self-defence.
'I am not in voice to-night.'

'But you had not a notion that we were here, had you?'
repeats Lady Betty pertinaciously.

'As we had heard you talking at the top of your voices
for half a mile before we came up to you, we had some
slight inkling of it.'

Peggy wonders whether the cold dryness of his tone is
as patent to the person to whom it is addressed as it is to
herself. She supposes that it is, since she instantly takes
possession of him; and, under the pretext of showing him
a plant which can scarcely be distinguishable from its
neighbours under the colourless moonlight, walks him off
into a dusky alley.

She looks him fully and gravely in the face. Most
people find it difficult to look at Freddy Ducane without
smiling. Peggy feels no such inclination. Between her
and this image of youth and sunshine there rises another
image—a poor little image, to whom this gay weather-cock
gives its weather—a little image that expands or shrinks as
this all-kissing zephyr blows warm or cold upon it.

'Because I have nothing to say, I suppose,' replies she
shortly.

'Come with me to the walled garden'—in a wheedling
voice—'and show me the stars.'

'Thank you, I can see them quite well here.'

'"My pretty Peg, my pretty Peg, Ah, never look so shy!"'

cries he, breaking into a laugh, which she does not
echo.

'I am not your pretty Peg; and I have told you several
times that I will not be called "Peg."'

'Peggy, then. Personally, I prefer Peg; but it is a
matter of opinion. Peggy, are you aware that you have
been poaching?'

'I do not know what you mean.' But she does.

'Her ladyship did not much like it, I can tell you,' continues
he delightedly. 'She manifested distinct signs of
uneasiness. I could not keep her quiet, though I went
through all my little tricks for her. She would make those
ridiculous noises; and she whipped him off pretty quickly,
did not she? Ah, Peggy'—tenderly—'you would have
done better to have kept to me! I would not have left
you in the lurch.'

'Where is Prue?' asks he, a moment later, with an easy
change of topic. 'What have you done with Prue?'

'I have done nothing with her,' rather sadly.

'You have sent her home with her nurse to bed, I suppose?'
suggests he reproachfully. 'I sometimes think that
you are a little hard upon Prue.'

Hard upon Prue! She, whose one thought, waking and
sleeping, is how best to put her strong arm round that
fragile body and weakling soul, so as to shield them from
the knocks of this rough world! This, too, from him,
who has introduced the one element of suffering it has ever
known into Prue's little life.

'Am I?' she answers quietly; but her cheek burns.

'There is no one that suits me so well as Prue,' says the
young man sentimentally, looking up to the sky.

'"She's like the keystone of an arch,That doth consummate beauty;She's like the music of a march,That maketh joy of duty!"'

Peggy's eye relents. He may mean it—may be speaking
truth—it is not likely, as he seldom does so; but after all,
the greatest liars must, during their lives, speak more truth
than lies. One is prone to believe what one wishes, and he
may mean it.

'There is no one that I am so fond of as I am of Prue,'
pursues he, with a quiver in his voice.

'You have an odd way of showing it sometimes,' says
she, in a softened tone.

'Are you alluding to that?' asks he, glancing carelessly
over his shoulder at the kiosk. 'Pooh! I hated it. I shall
get milady to pull it down some day. I was so glad when
you and Talbot came up: it was so dark, and I felt the
earwigs dropping on my head.'

He bursts into a laugh, from which sentiment and quiver
are miles away.

'The woman tempted me; at least' (seeing his companion's
mouth taking a contemptuous upward curve at
this mode of expression)—'at least, she seemed to expect it.
I always like to do what people seem to expect.'

CHAPTER V

'To one that has been long in city pent,'Tis very sweet to gaze upon the fairAnd open face of heaven—to breathe a prayerFull in the smile of the blue firmament.'

It is the next day. John Talbot has spent a very happy
morning. He is a countryman at heart. Fate has put him
into the Foreign Office, and made him a great man's secretary,
and tied him by the leg to London for ten months out of
the twelve; but the country, whose buttercups brightened
his childhood, keeps his heart—the country, with its little
larks upsoaring from its brown furrows; with its green and
its russet gowns; with its good, sweet, innocent noises, and
its heavenly smells. He has been lying on the flat of his
back on the sward, with his hands under his head, staring
in luxurious idleness up at the sky, and listening to the
robin's song—in August scarcely anybody but the redbreast
sings—and to the pleasant swish of the wind among the
lime-tops. Lying there alone on the flat of his back—that
is to say, at first. Afterwards he has plenty of company.
Not, indeed, that either his host or his fellow-guests trouble
him much. From the lair he has chosen he has a view of
his lady's window. It is true that he looks but seldom
towards it, nor do its carefully closed casements and
drawn curtains hold out much hope of a descent of the
sleeping goddess within. Lady Roupell lets it be understood
that she does not wish to be seen or spoken to till luncheon;[Pg 36]
and the rest are dispersed, he neither knows nor cares
whither. And yet he has companions. They are in the
act of being escorted out to walk by their nurses when they
catch sight of him. In an instant they bear down upon
him as fast as their fat legs will carry them.

'Just think!' cries Lily, beginning to shout at the top
of her voice long before she reaches him—'just think what
Franky has been doing! Is not he a naughty boy? He
took the water-can and emptied it over Nanny's skirt!
She says she will ask mammy to whip him!'

He has raised himself on his elbow, the more safely to
receive their onslaught. He is aware of an idiosyncrasy of
Miss Harborough's—that of narrating hideous crimes as
having been committed by her little brother, which have
in reality been executed by herself.

'If it was Franky who upset the water-can, how is it that
it is your frock which is wet?' asks he judicially.

She does not answer, beyond putting her head affectedly
on one side, and rubbing her shoulder against her ear.

'Are you sure that it was not you, and not Franky?'

Instantly, with the greatest ease and affability, she
acknowledges that it was she; and the nurses at that
moment coming up, she is about to be walked off for
chastisement, when weakly interceded for by Talbot, who
has the further lunacy to request that both children may
be left in his charge. After that he has a very eventful
morning. He is in turn a pony, a giraffe, a hyæna, a
flamingo (unhappily for him the little Harboroughs have
lately visited the Zoological Gardens), a rabbit (about the
natural history and domestic life of which animal he hears
some very startling facts), and the captain of a robber band.
Finally, he has to take part in a terrible game—the one
most dreaded by their family of all in the little Harborough[Pg 37]
repertoire—Ingestre Hall destroyed by fire, done with
bricks. And the odd thing is that he likes it—likes it
better than Downing Street and the great statesman.

When the luncheon gong sounds he can hardly realise
that it is two o'clock. He is so much dishevelled by his
transmigrations—which, indeed, have been as numerous as
Buddha's—that, after having repaired the injuries to his
toilette, he finds that everybody is already in the dining-room—finds
the inevitable chair left vacant for him beside
Lady Betty. He has sat by Lady Betty through so many
luncheons and dinners that it has lost the gloss of novelty,
and they speak to each other scarcely more than a husband
and wife would do. It is her voice that he hears prevailing
over those of the rest of the company as he enters the
room, for she has not Cordelia's gift.

'Lambton? Are they any relation to Lord Durham?'

'I do not think so,' replies the hostess carelessly. 'Their
father was a small squire in these parts, who over-farmed
himself, and died very much out at elbows. And their
mother—well, their mother was nothing but a very poor
creature' (with a shrug), 'who was always fancying herself
ill, and whom nobody believed until she proved it by dying!
Ha! ha! Poor soul! I do not think that anybody cried
much, except Peggy; she cried her eyes out.'

'Not quite out,' thinks Talbot, remembering the severe
blue darts that shot at him over-night; and to his own soul,
at this testimony to her tender-heartedness, he says, 'Nice
Peggy!'

'Which was Peggy?' asks Mr. Harborough, looking up
from his cutlet; 'the big one? Yes? I like Peggy. I do
not know when I have seen such a good-looking girl.'

His wife bursts into a laugh.

'I knew that Ralph would admire her. Did not I tell you
so?' turning to Talbot. 'She is just his style; they cannot
be too big for Ralph; he admires by avoirdupois weight.'[Pg 38]

'As to that, my dear,' retorts Mr. Harborough tranquilly,
'we all know that you are not much in the habit of
commending your own sex; but I think you will find that
I am not alone in my opinion.'

There is a moment's silence. Men are cowardly things.
Not one of them is found to take up the cudgels for poor
Margaret.

'She would be good-looking perhaps if she were bled,'
pursues Lady Betty; 'she looks so aggressively healthy!'

'You cannot make the same complaint of poor Prue, at
any rate,' says Lady Roupell, in a voice that betrays some
slight signs of dissatisfaction with her guest's observations,
for she likes her Lambtons.

'No; she is a high-coloured little skeleton!' rejoins
Betty, looking with pensive ill-nature at her plate. 'What
a pity that they cannot strike a balance! The one is as
much too small as the other is too big; they are like a
shilling and sixpence!'

And having thus peaceably demolished the sisters, whom
nobody defends, she passes smilingly to another subject.

After luncheon Talbot is lounging before the hall door,
with a cigarette, thinking, with a sort of subdued disgust
(engendered, perhaps, by the fragment of conversation but
now related) of himself, his surroundings, and his life in
general, when he is joined by his hostess, dressed for
walking—as villainously dressed as only a female millionnaire
dares be: a frieze jacket like a man's, a billycock hat set
on the top of her cap, and a stout stick in her hand. She
tells him that she is going down to the farm to see how the
stacks are getting on, and he strolls along aimlessly beside
her. He knows that he ought not—he knows that his
unwritten laws bind him for all the afternoon to the side of
the hammock where Lady Betty is swinging; and yet he
goes on strolling along by the side of an old woman to
whom no laws, either God's straight or man's crooked ones,[Pg 39]
bind him, simply opening his nostrils to the pungent perfume
of the hot bracken, and his eyes to the sight of the gentle
doves watching him from under Queen Elizabeth's oak.

Arrived at the farm, he is slowly making up his mind to
return to his duty, when his companion addresses him:

'Will you go a message for me?'

'With all the pleasure in life,' replies he, a slight misgiving
crossing his mind as to how he will be received on
his return after so prolonged a truancy.

'It is only just to run over to the Lambtons'.'

'The Lambtons'?'

'Yes—Peggy and Prue.'

'Of course, of course; but—but how am I to find them?'

'I thought you knew the way; I took you there last
year. You cannot miss it; a hundred yards down the
road'—(pointing)—'just outside the park; a little old red
house. You cannot miss it.'

She is turning away back to her ricks and her reapers
when he recalls her.

'But what am I to say when I get there?'

'Pooh?' she says, laughing; 'what a head I have! I
forgot the message. Tell Peggy we are all coming down
to-morrow afternoon, Sunday, as usual; and bid her have
plenty of muffins for us.'

As he walks along the road he ponders with himself
whether, if Margaret looks at him with the unaccountable
austerity of last night, he shall ever be able to give her that
insolent order for unlimited muffins.

Lady Roupell was right. There is no missing the way.
He almost wishes that there was. He has rung the bell—how
much too loudly! It seems as if it would never stop
clanging. And yet the odd thing is that he has produced
no result by his violence; nor does the stout Annian door
show any signs of rolling back on its hinges. He stares up
at the face of the house; every window wide open, and[Pg 40]
above each a little century-and-a-half-old decoration of
Cupids and cornucopias, and apples and grapes; a broken
arch over the relentless door, and on either hand of it a
great bush of traveller's joy, with its pretty welcoming
name; and a Virginia creeper, in its dazzling decay, showing
the stained and faded red brick what red can be. Is that
one of the windows of the drawing-room on the right-hand
side—that window into which he has so much difficulty in
hindering himself from looking—with the green earthenware
cruches and the odd-shaped majolica pot crammed with
corn marigolds on the window-ledge? It is certainly very
strange. He rings again, more mildly, but still very distinctly,
without any further result than before. A third
time; the same silence. A ridiculous idea crosses his
mind that perhaps Margaret has seen from an upper
window who her visitor is, and has forbidden any of her
household to admit him; and, though he dismisses it as
incredible, he is so disheartened by it, and by his thrice-repeated
failures to attract attention, that he is turning
away towards the entrance-gate, when, at last, something
happens. A figure appears, flying round the corner of the
house; a figure so out of breath, so dishevelled, so incoherent,
that it is some seconds before he recognises in it the younger
Miss Lambton—the 'high-coloured little skeleton,' as his
gentle lady had sweetly baptized her. High-coloured she
is now with a vengeance!

'Oh! it is you, is it?' she cries pantingly. He has never
been presented to her, nor have they ever exchanged a
sentence; but, in great crises like the present, the social
code goes to the wall. 'Oh, I wonder could you help us?
we are in such trouble!' Her tone is so navré that his heart
stands still. Peggy is dead, of course. 'The fox has got
out!' pursues she, sobbing; 'got out of his house, and we
do not know what has become of him!'

'The fox!' repeats he, relieved of his apprehensions, and[Pg 41]
with a flash of self-reproach—'of course it was a fox! of
course it was not a badger!'

Surprise at this observation checks Prue's tears.

'No!' says she; 'who ever thought it was?'

And at that moment another tumultuous figure appears
round the corner of the house. This time it is Margaret;
Margaret nearly as breathless, as scarlet, as tearful as Prue.
On catching sight of Talbot she pulls herself into a walk,
and with a laudable, instantaneous struggle to look cold
and neat and repellent, she holds out her hand.

'I hope you have not been waiting long,' she says
formally. (The little unconquerable pants between each
word betray her.) 'Did you ring often? I am afraid that
there was nobody in the house; we were all, servants and
all, about the fields and garden. Oh!' (nature and sorrow
growing too strong for her) 'have you heard of our
misfortune?'

'That I have,' replies Talbot, throwing as much sympathetic
affection as that organ is capable of into his voice;
'and I am so sorry!'

'He has never been out except upon a chain in all his
life, poor little fellow!' says Peggy, sinking dejectedly
upon a large old-fashioned round stone ball, one of which
ornaments each side of the door. 'He will know no more
than a baby how to take care of himself!'

'Cellar?' growing wild in his suggestions. 'Once I
knew a hard-pressed fox run right into a cellar.'

'Even there.'

Talbot is at the end of his ingenuity. But at least there
is one thing gained—she has spoken to him as to a fellow-sufferer.

This is no great advance perhaps, since were a new
Deluge to cover the earth, which of us would not cling
round the neck of a parricide if he were on a higher ledge
of rock than we?

'If he is once away in the open,' says Margaret desperately,
'he is sure to get into a trap or be worried by a dog; he
has no experience of life. Oh, poor little man!'

Her eyes brim up, and her voice breaks.

Prue has fallen, limp and whimpering, upon the other
stone ball. Talbot stands between the mourners.

'Come,' says he stoutly, 'let us be doing something.
Let us rout out every possible hole and corner once again;
and if he does not turn up, I will go and tell the game-keepers
and the farm-labourers to be on the look-out for
him.'

Something in the manly energy of his tone puts new life
into the dispirited girls, and the search recommences.

The procession is swelled by the three maids, with their
aprons over their heads; by the stable-boy, and by Jacob
with a pitchfork. It is led by Talbot, whose zeal sometimes
degenerates into ostentation, as when he insists on exploring
chinks into which the leanest lizard could not squeeze itself,
and on running his stick through little heaps of mown grass
where not a field-mouse could lie perdue.

The party has gradually dispersed in different directions,
and Talbot finds himself alone in the tool-house, which has
been already twice explored. In one corner stands a pile[Pg 43]
of pots of all sizes, reaching almost to the roof, and with
its monotony enlivened by a miscellaneous stock of rakes,
pea-sticks, and scythes leaning against it. The whole
erection looks too solid to admit of its being a hiding-place
for anything, but it is possible that there may be a hollow
behind it.

After prying about for a few moments on his knees, he
finds indeed an aperture, which has been hidden by a
pendent bit of bass-matting—an aperture large enough to
admit the passage of a small animal. To this aperture he
applies his eye. What does he see? Two things like
green lamps glaring at him from the darkness. Aha! he
is here!

CHAPTER VI

Talbot looks round apprehensively. Heaven send that
no one, neither meddlesome Jacob, nor gaping boy, nor
screaming maids, nor—worst of all—Peggy herself, may
come up till he has got at his prey, may come up to rob
him of the glory of safe recovery and restoration. In his
haste he incautiously thrusts in his arm, feels something
warm and woolly, but feels too, at the same instant, a
smart stinging sensation as of little teeth fastening on his
finger. He draws his hand away quickly, and shakes it,
for the pain is acute.

'You are there, my young friend, that is very clear.'

But he cannot be stopped by such a trifle! He hastily
binds up his wound with his pocket-handkerchief, and
begins quickly to enlarge the opening. As it grows, he has to
fill it with his body, to obviate the danger of the fox making
a dash past him. In the course of his labours, several
little pots fall about his ears; a dislodged spade-handle
gives him a brisk blow on the shoulder; old cobwebs get
into his mouth. But he is rewarded at last. Through the
breach he has made daylight pours in, and shows him a
little red form crouched up against the wall, and showing
all its dazzling white teeth in a frenzy of fear. Poor little
beast! Probably some indistinct memory of the cruel
hounds that tore its mother limb from limb is giving its
intensity of terror to that grin. But if he is suffering from
fear, he is also perhaps at present a little calculated to[Pg 45]
inspire it. It just crosses Talbot's mind how exceedingly
unpleasant it will be, if, in these very close quarters, the
companion of his tête-à-tête makes for his nose. There is
nothing for it but to take the initiative. It occurs to him
that he may have a pair of dog-skin gloves in his pocket;
and this on examination, proving to be the case, he puts
them on. The right-hand glove will of course not go over
the handkerchief that binds his finger. It—the handkerchief—has
therefore to be removed, and the blood spurts out
afresh. What matter? Thus protected, without further
delay he makes a bold grab, past that grinning, gleaming
row of fangs, at the scruff of the fox's neck, and having got
a good grip of it, proceeds to back out of the hole, dragging
his booty after him; the booty snapping, and holding on
to the ground with all his four pads in agonised protestation.

To back out of a hole, with all the blood in your body
running to your head, smothered in cobwebs, with dusty
knees and barked knuckles—this is hardly the way in
which a man would wish to present himself to a woman
with whom he is anxious to stand well. And yet it is
under these conditions that Peggy, at whose feet he finds
himself on having completed his retrograde movement, first
sees anything in him to admire.

'So you have found him?' cries she, dropping on her
knees, and turning a radiant face towards the procession
on all-fours which has now quite emerged into the daylight;
'behind the pots? and we thought that we had searched
everywhere so carefully. How clever of you!—but' (her
tone changing) 'you have hurt him!' her glance falling on
a few drops of Talbot's blood which, stealing from under
the glove, have dropped on the fox's fur.

'I do not think so,' replies the young man drily; but
he does not more directly claim his own property, nor
protest against the—as it happens—rather ingenious injustice
of this accusation.[Pg 46]

'Then he has hurt you!' says she, drawing this obvious
inference; and her blue eye darts like lightning at his hand.
'He has bitten you! oh, how shocking of him! Not badly?'

'He mistook me for a hound, I suppose,' replies John,
smiling.

'He was determined that you should not forget a second
time that he was a fox,' says she, breaking into a charming
mischievous laugh, lapsing, however, at once again into
grave solicitude; 'but it is not a bad bite, is it? Let me
look! Here, Prue! take this little villain home, and shut
him up, and let us hear no more about him!'

Prue complies, and the two young people remain in the
tool-house alone.

'Let me look,' says she, beginning very delicately to
pull off the glove, so as not to hurt him. 'How did he
manage to get at you through this thick glove?'

'I did not put it on till afterwards,' replies Talbot. 'Of
whom does that trait remind you? If it is Simple Simon,
do not mind saying so!'

They both laugh.

'But it is a dreadful bite!' says she, holding the
wounded finger with two or three of her slight yet strong
ones—fingers a little embrowned by much practical gardening,
and down which he now feels little shivers of
compunction and concern running. 'Almost to the bone!
oh, poor finger! I feel so guilty. Come with me into the
house, and let me tie it up for you.'

He is in no great hurry to have it tied up. He likes
the dusty tool-house, and is not at all alarmed at the sight
of his own gore; but, consoling himself with the reflection
that Prue will probably pass some time in weeping over
and fondling their amiable pet, and that he has a good
chance of, at all events, some further tête-à-tête over the rag
and oil-silk, he follows her docilely, and presently finds
himself inside the little room into which he had had so[Pg 47]
much ado to hinder himself from peering during his long
kicking his heels at the hall door.

It proves to be not a drawing-room after all—to have
more of the character and informality of a little sitting-hall;
a room where dogs may jump on the chairs with as valid
a right as Christians; a room with an oak settle by the
chimney-corner, and a great cage full of twittering finches
in a sunny window, and into which half the flowers of the
field seem to have walked, and colonised its homely vases;
a room with nothing worth twopence-halfpenny in it, and
that yet is sweet and lovable.

He has not many minutes in which to make his
explorations, for she is promptly back with her appliances,
and silently binding round his finger her bit of linen that
smells of lavender.

As she stoops over his hand he can look down on the
top of her head, and admire her parting—a thing which
not many ladies possess nowadays. Hers is as straight as
a die; and on each side of that narrow white road rises
the thick fine hair, bright and elastic.

It is many years since Betty has owned a parting. On
the other hand, she has two very nice toupets—a morning
and an evening one. Talbot has once or twice seen one of
these toupets off duty, and has regretted his knowledge
that it came off and on. Well, there is nothing about
Peggy that comes off and on.

How quickly and daintily she has dressed his wound,
and—oh! if here is not Prue already back again!

'Have you shut him safely in?' looking up from her
nearly finished task.

'Yes.'

'And given him his dinner?'

'Yes; but he will not eat it. I think he is seriously
vexed; he tried to bite me, too!'

'We did not exactly choose him,' replies Margaret
gravely; 'he was sent to us; all the rest of the litter were
killed. He was the only one the huntsman could save.
He brought him to show us. He was a mere ball of fluff
then. One could not turn away a poor little orphan ball
of fluff from one's door, could one?'

'He was a very tiresome orphan then, as he always has
been since,' says Prue drily. 'No one but Peggy would
have been bothered with him; he was far more trouble
than a baby. She had him,'—turning towards Talbot—'to
sleep in her room for a whole fortnight, and got up
every two hours all through the night to feed him.'

Margaret reddens.

'He would have died else!'

'But no other person on earth would have had the patience,
would they?' cries Prue, warming with her theme.

'Prue!' says Peggy severely, 'is my trumpeter dead,
and are you applying for the situation?'

At this moment the door opens, and one of the three
neat maids whom John has already seen careering about
the pleasure-grounds in pursuit of the fox, enters with a
tea-tray.

The sight of a covered dish of hot cakes recalls to
Talbot the original object of his visit.

'Oh, by the bye, I was forgetting! I have a message
for you from Lady Roupell.'

'Have you?'

She is standing, straight and lithe as a young poplar,
by the tea-table, brandishing a brown teapot in her hand.

'Yes. She bid me tell you that they are all coming
down to see you to-morrow afternoon.'

Is it his imagination that a sudden slight stiffening
comes over her as he speaks—a stiffening that seems to
extend even to the friendly teapot?[Pg 49]

'And also,' continues he, not much liking his errand,
and hastening to get it over, 'she desired me to say that,
as she is particularly fond of muffins, and as yours are an
exceptionally good——'

'Are you sure that she said all that?' interrupts Prue,
with a sceptical gaiety. 'She is not generally so polite.
She generally says only, "Girls, I'm coming; have lots of
muffins!"'

Talbot laughs, convicted.

'Perhaps that was nearer the mark.'

'I am so glad that they are all coming,' pursues Prue,
with excitement. 'Will Lady Betty come? Oh, I hope
so! How beautiful she is! What eyes! What a colour!'

Talbot looks sheepish. The alarmingly increased volume
and splendour of his Betty's carnations of late have been
the cause of several sharp altercations between him and
her. And yet he cannot doubt that the child says it in
all good faith. It is not at the corners of her mouth that
that tiny malicious smile is lurking. To him how much
pleasanter a topic was the fox! He relishes the change in
the conversation so little that he scalds his throat in his
haste to drink his tea and be gone.

As he walks home across the park he entertains himself
with the reflection how he shall account to Betty for his
finger.

CHAPTER VII

Next day is

'The day that comes betweenA Saturday and Monday,'

as the pretty old song obliquely puts it. Such of the
parish as are not Dissenters, drunkards, or the mothers of
young babies (it does not leave a very large margin), have
been to morning church. The Vicarage, the Manor, and
the Red House have all been represented. The Vicarage
sits immediately below the pulpit, so that the preacher's
eloquence may soar on stronger pinions, upborne by the
sight of the nine ugly faces to whom he has given the light
of day. The Manor, with its maids, footmen, and stables,
spreads half over the aisle; and in one of its pews the Red
House, pewless itself, is allowed to take its two seats.

On this particular morning Peggy's devotions are a good
deal distempered by the fact of her having Miss Harborough
for a neighbour—Miss Harborough without her nurse;
Miss Harborough wriggling a good deal, bringing out of
her pocket things new and old; and finally (the devil
having entered into her), when the hymn begins, striking
up in rivalry, 'Over the Garden Wall.' As, however, no
one perceives this piece of iniquity except Peggy, who
feigns not to hear it, she desists, and adopts instead the
less reprehensible but still somewhat embarrassing course
of closely copying Peggy's every smallest gesture—unbuttoning
her glove, turning a page of her prayer-book,[Pg 51]
whipping out her pocket-handkerchief at the very same
instant as her unwitting model. It is even a relief when
this flattering if servile imitation gives way to loud stage-whispers,
such as, 'Franky has got his book upside down;'
'Don't you wish you were as tall as John Talbot?' 'Evans
is all in white;' 'Did you hear me say the Lord's Prayer?'
etc. etc.

It is afternoon now. You need not be either a Dissenter,
a drunkard, or a mother, not to go to church in the afternoon.
Nobody goes—nobody, that is, except Mr. Evans
and the children whom he catechises, asking them questions
which they never answer, and which he would be very
much embarrassed if they did. Luncheon is over.

'Let us give them all the slip,' says Lady Betty. 'I
know what milady's Sunday walks are—she does not spare
one a turnip or a pigsty; and as to going to tea with the
Lambtons, I say, like the man in the Bible, "I prithee
have me excused."'

Talbot, to whom this is addressed, follows her in silence,
to where, beneath a great lime-tree only just out of flower,
hangs the hammock, spread the wolf-skins, stand the wicker-chairs
and tables, the iced drinks, and the Sunday papers.

'Now we'll be happy!' says Betty, sitting down sideways
on the hammock, and adroitly whisking her legs in after
her. 'As soon as milady's back is turned I will have a
cigarette, and you shall talk me to sleep. By the bye,'
with a slight tinge of umbrage in her tone, 'your conversation
of late has rather tended to produce that effect.'

'And what better effect could it produce?' asks John
ironically. 'I sometimes wish that I could get some one
to talk me to sleep for good and all!'

'How tiresome!' cries his fair one, not paying much
heed to this lugubrious aspiration, and feeling in her
pocket. 'I have left my cigarette-case in the house; go,
like a good fellow, and get it for me. Ask Julie for it.'[Pg 52]

He goes with the full docility of a pack-horse or a performing
poodle, and on his way indoors meets his young
host, sent by his aunt in search of the truants, and to
whom he imparts Betty's change of plans.

'So you are not coming!' says Freddy, in a broken-hearted
voice, throwing himself into a chair. In his soul
he is rather glad.

'So I'm not coming!' repeats she, mimicking his tone.

'May not I stay too?' travelling over the sward in his
chair nearer the hammock, and lightly touching the pendent
white hand.

'I do not know to whom you are alluding. But may
not I stay?' with a slight tremble in his voice.

'Of course you may,' replies she cheerfully. 'Who
hinders you?—stay by all means!'

He looks confused. He has not the slightest wish to
stay. He has only followed his habitual impulse to say
what he imagines to be the agreeable thing—an impulse
that has already led him into many quagmires, and will
lead him into many more.

'I would not be so selfish,' he says with a charming
smile of abnegation; 'I know my place better,' with an
expressive glance at the back of the disappearing John.
And, suiting the action to the word, he disappears too;
when she screams after him:

'Give my love to the sack of potatoes and the skeleton!'

By the time that Talbot returns with the cigarette-case
the coast is quite clear, and Betty is at liberty to light her
cigarette as soon as she pleases; a liberty of which she
immediately avails herself.

There is a prospect before them of an unbroken tête-à-tête
until eight o'clock. With how deep a joy and elation ought[Pg 53]
this reflection to fill him! A year ago it would have done
so. To-day with how leaden a foot does the stable clock
pace from quarter to quarter. And yet there is no lack of
talk. He himself, indeed, does not contribute much; but
Betty is in a fine flow. She favours him—not for the first
time by many—with several unamiable traits in Mr.
Harborough's character, with the dreadful things her
dearest friend said of her last week—faithfully reported to
her by her second dearest—together with various shady
particulars in the personal history of both friends. She
gives him the latest details of an internecine broil between
two ladies, both candidates for the favour of a great personage.
She makes some good jokes upon the death of
a relation, and the approaching collapse of an intimate
acquaintance's reputation; and, in short, dots her i's and
crosses her t's, and calls a spade a spade, and enjoys herself
famously. And he? He listens in a sort of wonder.

This, then, is what he has for five years sacrificed his
career to. This, then—to be alone with this—he has
manœuvred for invitations, planned risky rendezvous,
abandoned the hope of home's sanctities. A heavy leaden
sickness seems to steal over him. He is recalled to the
present by a tone of very decided indignation in his lady's
voice—his lady, who, by an easy transition, has slipped from
scandal to the hardly dearer or less dear subject of clothes.

'Shepherd is a beast! Just fancy! he sent me out
deer-stalking in a silk skirt! Why, you are not listening
to a word I say!'

It is in vain for him to protest. On cross-examination
he shows so culpable an ignorance as to who Shepherd is—though
heaven knows that in his day he has heard enough
of the great woman's tailor—that her ladyship's anger is
heightened instead of appeased.

'You certainly are not amusing to-day,' cries she, flouncing
out of the hammock.[Pg 54]

'I never was much of a Jack Pudding,' replies he wearily.
'Was I ever amusing? I do not recollect it. I think that
I left that to you.'

His tone is so dry that she reddens even under her
rouge.

'Perhaps it is your finger that pains you too much,' says
she, looking round her armoury for a weapon of offence, and
rather cleverly hitting upon this one. 'We have never got
to the bottom of that mysterious wound yet. I believe it
is somehow connected with your Blowsabella. Perhaps
you became too attentive, and she had to set her dog or
her cat upon you in self-defence.'

There is such a horrible caricature of the truth in this
supposition, and her tone is so insulting, that he turns pale,
and it is a moment or two before he can speak; then:

'Do not you think it would be a good thing if you gave
up this sort of joke?' he asks, with a rather dangerous
quietness. 'They are not very ladylike. Had you not
better leave them to Julie?'

He has no sooner finished these sentences than Betty
bursts into tears. She had imagined that she was amusing
him as much as herself; and, indeed, he has often before
laughed heartily at things not less ill-natured or more
harmless; now the disgust and ennui of his tone are a
disagreeable revelation to her. And besides, as I have
before observed, her paint is of that quality that she may
confidently afford herself a few tears. But even if it were
not to be done with safety she must give way to them
now, anger and mortification forcing them from her eyes.

Now if there is one thing that a waning lover dreads
more than a quarrel, it is the reconciliation that follows it.
So, by the time that Betty has sobbed, and wished herself
and him dead, and announced her intention of telling Mr.
Harborough, and going away to-morrow and taking Freddy
Ducane with her, and been apologised to and comforted,[Pg 55]
her admirer is reduced to such a pitch of flat lassitude of
mind that there is no bidding of hers which he would not
tamely execute. He therefore acquiesces dumbly when,
her smiles being at length restored, she proposes that they
shall go to tea with the Lambtons after all. They can
easily overtake the others, and perhaps it will be more
amusing than sitting here quarrelling—'though there is a
certain charm in quarrelling too!' she adds sentimentally.

As he cannot echo this, he pretends not to hear it. His
mind is occupied by the doubt, which he is unable to resolve,
whether her proposal is dictated by a generous desire
to make an amende, or by further malice. She is perfectly
capable of either. They have not a very pleasant walk.
Betty's preposterous heels turn under her at every three
steps; and though she always says that she is very fond of
the country, she generally forgets to look at it, while John
loves it too heartily and deeply dear to say anything about
it to such ears.

As they near the Red House his heart sinks lower and
lower. He has never had the moral courage to confess his
yesterday's visit, and the episode that marked it. There
are ninety-nine chances to one against his escaping without
some inquiry after his finger, some mention of the fox,
some chance allusion which will betray him. And then?
what then? Why, another quarrel, another reconciliation.
Pah! No; sooner than face that he will be telegraphed
for back to Downing Street.

They are not kept waiting at the door at all to-day, but
are at once ushered through the house into the garden,
where they are told that they will find Miss Lambton.

As she hears their footsteps she looks up, and sees them
approaching—Betty stepping smartly ahead, and Talbot
following sheepishly behind. He is conscious of there
being a sort of false air of man and wife about them—a
happy couple spending their Sunday afternoon in parading[Pg 56]
their domestic bliss before their friends. By an intuition
that he would far rather have been without, he sees the
same idea passing through Margaret's mind, and reflected
in a sudden cloud, and as sudden honest redness on her
face. Certainly any stranger coming in upon the scene
would be more likely to credit him with the honour of
being Lady Betty's owner than he would the insignificant
figure kneeling and mysteriously bending over something
on the top of the stone steps that lead down a gentle bank
from the gravel walk to the sward and the vivid August borders—a
figure whose manœuvres are interestedly watched by
the rest of the company, and which does not take the trouble
to turn its head an inch at the sound of its wife's voice.

'We have been quarrelling,' cries Betty, with a sprightly
candour which grates horribly upon Talbot, 'and we have
come to you to help us to keep the peace. Oh!'—making
a face—'so Ralph is showing you some of his tricks. I
would not look at them if I were you. He will never
leave you any peace if you encourage him! The whole of
the first year of our married life he spent in teaching me
to tie knots in my pocket-handkerchief and swallow spoons;
and I have never found that I have been much the better
for either.'

Not a shadow of a smile shows itself upon Margaret's
face, but Prue has smiles enough for the two.

'He is showing us how to mesmerise a hen!' cries she
delightedly. 'Oh! it is so clever! I cannot think how
he does it!'

In effect, upon closer examination, Mr. Harborough is
seen to be grappling with a large barn-door fowl, which is
squawking a good deal, and resisting his efforts to hold her
nose down upon the stone step; while Freddy, with a
piece of chalk, draws a straight line from her beak to the
end of the step.

'You must none of you speak!' says Mr. Harborough,[Pg 57]
with authority. 'If you talk, you will prevent her going
off into the mesmeric sleep.'

Dead silence. The protesting squalls have ceased.
After a few moments the hands that hold her are lightly
removed. She lies quite still.

'There!' says the operator, in a tone of subdued
triumph; 'she will not awake until the chalk line is rubbed
out. Curious, is not it?'

But even as he speaks Dame Partlet, to give him the lie,
has struggled to her legs, and lustily screeching, makes off
with her longest stride and fluttered wings. Instantly the
whole company gives chase. John Talbot, Mr. Harborough,
Freddy Ducane, Margaret, Prue, even Chinese-footed
Betty, two collies, and a terrier, who have been
standing officiously round, all off in full cry at once.
Across the garden-beds; through Jacob's best potatoes;
over the sunk fence into the open park, helter-skelter they
go—John leading, closely followed by Freddy and Mr.
Harborough, while the three women tear madly behind.

John has got her! Not at all! She has slipped between
his fingers, and he has measured his length on the grass!
Then it is Freddy's turn, but she runs between his legs, and
down goes he too. Certainly she is a gallant hen! John is
up again, and now both he and Peggy make an unsuccessful
lunge at her as she passes; and if it had not been for Mink,
who adroitly pinned her by the wing—a feat for which he
was afterwards much blamed, though they profited by his
discourtesy—they would probably still have been tumbling
over each other in pursuit of that speckled hen.

At the moment when Peggy and John had made their
joint and futile grab at the object of their chase, her hand
had come with some violence into contact with his wounded
one. Instantly she is off her guard, and down from her stilts.

He adds the last words with a hasty attempt to keep
the conversation to the one topic over which alone they
seem fated to be friendly.

'He is very well! better'—with a slight smile—'than
he deserves.'

'I should like to see him, to tell him that I bear no
malice.'

She looks irresolute for a moment; then, 'Would you?
Come this way!'

Before they have made three steps Betty is after them.

'Where are you two making off to in such a hurry?'

'We are going to see the fox,' replies Peggy coldly.

'The fox? What fox?'

'Why, my tame fox,' rejoins Peggy, with a little air of
surprise; 'the one that bit Mr. Talbot when he was here
yesterday.'

The murder is out.

'H'm!' says Betty, in a very dry voice; 'so the mystery
is solved!'

'What mystery?' asks the other, in a tone of ever
colder and growing astonishment. 'There is no mystery;
it is only that my fox escaped from his house yesterday,
and Mr. Talbot was good enough to catch him again for
me; and in so doing was unfortunately bitten. What
mystery is there in that?'

Her displeased blue eyes turn in inquiry from one to
the other, but neither has any answer ready for her. Nor
does she again repeat her question; but Talbot, stealing
one guilty look at her, sees that she has comprehended
that he has been afraid to own his visit to her, and that
she despises him heartily for it.

CHAPTER VIII

John Talbot spends a wretched night. He does not owe
this to the fact of Betty's infantine gambols, her ogles and
cats'-cradles with Freddy Ducane through the previous
evening; nor yet to any physical ill. It is one ray of
honest contempt from a country-bred girl's heaven-blue
eye that kills his rest. It seems to shine in upon his whole
life, as a beam of clear morning sunshine shines in upon
some ugly over-night revel, bringing out into all their unlovely
prominence the wine-stains, and the guttered candles,
and the faded flowers. A desire, whose futility he recognises,
but which is none the less real for the impossibility
of its ever being gratified, to set himself right with this
thrice-seen stranger, takes possession of him; a desire to
tell her his story—to lay before her the reasons why she
should be lenient with him. Would she think them very
cogent? His memory, made acuter by the darkness, journeys
back over the past five years, weighing, sifting, recalling—back
to the beginning, that August when his chief's
affairs kept him in London after everybody else had left;
when, sick at heart from a recent grief, he had fallen sick
in body too; and when Betty, also detained in London by
some accident—Betty, whom he had hitherto met only as
one meets in the world, hearing of his sad plight, had come
out of pure kind-heartedness—yes, he is quite sure that at
first it was only out of pure kind-heartedness—to sit beside
his sofa; Betty, laden with sweet flowers; Betty, with[Pg 60]
compassionate eyes and a womanly smile; Betty, with less
paint and a lower voice; with more clothes and fewer
after-dinner stories; and last, fatalest of all, with that
likeness, fancied or real, to the sister he had just lost. He
remembers the day on which he first told her of that resemblance.
In the dark night he recalls again many
another little landmark in that first period of his passion,
and grows half tender again as their dead faces rise before
him. But what did that first idyllic stage lead to? To
nothing, indeed, as criminal as the world, as Margaret probably
gives them credit for, but to those unhandsome
shifts and expedients which have made of his life since one
long shuffle and evasion. The kotowing to people he disliked
and despised for invitations to meet her; the risky
rendezvous; the mad jealousies; the half-heartedness in
his work; the entire disintegration of all his plans, liable
to be upset at a moment's notice, in order to dovetail in
with her convenience; the irrepressible senseless friendliness,
which he dare not refuse, on the part of the stupid
worthy Harborough; the genuine fondness of that Harborough's
little children—he looks back upon them all with
nausea. No! there is nothing to be said for him! She
would say that there was nothing to be said for him! He
has slidden down a precipice, it is true, whose first slope
was easy and gentle; but there were many bushes at which
he might have caught in his downward passage to save
himself if he had wished; and he caught at none. And
now he is at the bottom! The very passion which gave
some slight tinge of a bastard nobility to his ignoble life is
dead—dead as the roses that flushed its dawn, and he must
still be tied to its lifeless body as fast as—nay, faster than—he
was to its living charms. This is his conclusion; and
it is one not much calculated to lull him into slumber.

To prove the difference between a bad conscience and a
good one, Margaret sleeps calmly; but she wakes in the[Pg 61]
morning with the sense of something faintly disagreeable
having happened. She shakes it off as she goes about her
garden and her chicken-pens, the more easily as Prue is in
bounding spirits, which is to be accounted for by the fact
of Freddy having invited her to go out riding with him in
the afternoon, and promised to mount her upon one of his
own horses—a privilege often before accorded to her, but
which never fails to lift her into Elysium. She is too excited
to settle to anything more solid than jumping over
the garden-beds and the tennis-net, to and fro with Mink.
If you are in paradise, why trouble yourself with earth's
sordid tasks? But Margaret, not being in paradise, is
meditatively grubbing on hands and knees in the rather
overgrown border, when a ring at the door-bell brings her
somewhat quickly to her feet. A sudden thought sends
the indignant blood to her cheek. Is it possible that it
can be Talbot? After yesterday, is it conceivable that he
can have the presumption again to force himself upon her?
She moves hastily towards the house to forbid his admission,
if it be he. But she is too late. The visitor has been
already let in; and proves to be one to whom her door is
never shut—only Freddy Ducane.

'Have you come to fix the time for your ride?' asks
she cordially, beaming upon him. He, at least, has
wrenched himself out of Circe's sty. 'Do you want Prue?
She is in the garden.'

The young man looks a shade embarrassed.

'Yes,' he says; 'I do. No; I do not—at least, I have
something to say to her, but I think'—insinuatingly—'that
I had rather say it to you. You know, Peggy, how
fond I am of saying things to you! There is no one to
whom I can say things as comfortably as I can to you.'

At this preface her heart sinks a little.

'What is it?' she asks curtly.

'Oh, only my luck!' throwing himself into a chair.[Pg 62]
'By Jove'—looking round the room—'how cool you feel!
and how good you smell!'

'I do not suppose that you came here to say that,'
rejoins she, still standing over him in expectant anxiety.

His answer is to try and get possession of her hand.

'Peggy,' he says plaintively, 'that is not a nice way to
speak to me; that is not the way I like to be spoken to.
The reason why I came here—it is very inhospitable of
you to insist upon my giving a reason—was to say'—sighing
profoundly—'that I fear dear little Prue and I shall
have to give up our ride this afternoon.'

Her foreboding was a true one then!

'Why?'

'Oh, because—because—just my luck!'

'I understand,' replies she caustically. 'You are in the
case of the man who telegraphed to the house where he
did not wish to stay, "So sorry. Cannot come. No lie
ready."'

Freddy colours.

'Peggy, if I were not so really fond of you,' he says, in
an injured voice, 'I should not allow you to speak to me
like that. There are days when you rasp one like a file.
Prue never rasps one.'

'Is that the reason why you think yourself justified in
always letting her go to the wall?' asks Margaret, with
a bitterness that seems out of proportion to the occasion;
but in her mind's eye she sees the poor little figure that
has been frolicking among the geraniums with dog and cat—sees,
too, the metamorphosis that will be worked in it.

Freddy rolls his curly head uneasily to and fro on the
chair-back.

'You talk as if I were not quite as disappointed as she,'
he says, in a lamentable tone. 'But what is one to do?
When one has guests, one must entertain them. Somebody
must entertain her.'[Pg 63]

'Must entertain whom?'

'Oh, you know as well as I do! You are only asking
out of ill-nature. Betty, of course!'

'Betty, of course!' repeats she after him, with an indefinable
accent.

'Well, Peggy, I appeal to you. What could I do, when
she asked me point-blank? You know that I never can
refuse to do anything that anybody asks me point-blank.'

'Then suppose that I ask you point-blank to throw her
over?' suggests Margaret, looking full at him with her
straightforward blue eyes.

'But you would not,' returns he hastily. 'You dear
thing, it would not be the least like you; and it would
only make her hate Prue for life. Ah, you do not know
Betty!'

'And, meanwhile, where is her âme damnée, pray?' asks
Margaret with a curling nose.

'"Where is John Talbot? Where is valiant John?"'

Freddy shrugs his shoulders.

'Valiant John is a little slack of late; he wants poking
up a bit. But'—with a coaxing change of tone—'it will
be just the same to Prue to go another day, will not it?
and you will tell her, will not you? I—I really am in a
great hurry this morning; and I—I—think I had rather
you told her.'

'I will do nothing of the kind,' replies Peggy severely.
'You may do your own errands.'

Nor do any of his blandishments, any of his numerous
assertions of the reverential attachment he has always felt
for herself, any of his asseverations of the agonising grief it
causes him to give the slightest pain to Prue, avail to make
her budge one inch from her original resolution. She
watches him as, with a somewhat hang-dog air, he walks
across the grass-plot to meet her sister, who comes treading[Pg 64]
on air to meet him. And then Margaret looks away. She
cannot bear to witness the extinction of that poor short
radiance. She does not again meet young Ducane; nor
does Prue reappear until luncheon-time, when she comes
down from her bedroom with red eyes, but an air of
determined cheerfulness.

'It would have been much too hot for riding to-day,' she
says, fanning herself; 'unbearable, indeed! We are going
a far longer ride in a day or two. He says he does not
think that they will stay long. He was so bitterly disappointed.
I do not think that I ever saw any one so
disappointed—did you?' casting a wistful glance at her
elder.

'He said he was,' replies Peggy sadly.

The incident has made her own heart heavy; and it is
with an unelastic step that she sets off in the afternoon to
the Manor, summoned thither by one of Lady Roupell's
almost daily cocked-hat notes, to hold sweet converse upon
the arrangements of an imminent village concert. A casual
sentence to the effect that everybody but the old lady herself
will be out has decided Margaret to obey the summons,
which, did it expose her to a meeting with Lady Betty and
John Talbot, she would have certainly disregarded.

Prue accompanies her to their gate, still with that
strained look of factitious content on her childish face;
and, as she parts from her sister, whispers feverishly:

'Find out how soon they are going!'

Dispirited as she was on leaving her own home, Miss
Lambton's cheerfulness undergoes still further diminution
before she reaches her goal; as, in passing through the
park, has not she, in a retired and bosky dell, caught a
glimpse of a white gown, and of a supine male figure, with
a curly head and a poetry book, stretched beside it? She
starts at the sight.

Freddy had certainly implied that he was going out[Pg 65]
riding with Lady Betty. On searching her memory, she
found that he had not actually said so; but he had knowingly
conveyed that idea to her mind. It is not the first
time by many that Freddy Ducane has succeeded in conveying
impressions that do not absolutely tally with the
fact; but each fresh discovery of his disingenuousness gives
her a new shock. Lady Roupell's boudoir is upstairs; and,
following her usual custom, Margaret repairs thither unannounced.
In doing so she passes the day nursery's open
door; and, through it, sees Miss Harborough sitting on the
floor, buttoning her boots. Peggy stops a moment to throw
the child a greeting; but is instantly checked by the
nurse.

'Oh, please, ma'am, do not speak to her! I am sure
that she does not deserve it! she has been a real naughty
girl!'

On inquiry, it appears that the enemy of man having
again entered into Miss Lily, she has cut the string of her
necklace, strewed the beads all over the floor, and then told
a barefaced lie, and entirely denied it.

During this recital of her iniquities she continues her
buttoning quite calmly; and merely says, with a dispassionate
tone of indifference and acquiescence:

'Yes, I am bad.'

It is two hours later—so long does the discussion over
the penny reading last—before Margaret again passes the
nursery door. The interval has been filled by a discussion
as to which of the local talent must be invited to contribute,
and which may be, without giving too much offence, left
out; but the larger part has been spent in a confederate
consultation as to how best to prevent Mrs. Evans from
singing 'Love, the Pilgrim.'

The matter is arranged at last; and Peggy puts on her
hat and gloves again to depart. As she repasses the
nursery door she finds that an entire change of decoration[Pg 66]
has taken place. Instead of the young cynic defiantly
buttoning her boots in the teeth of the law, she sees a little
pious figure in a white nightgown, kneeling by its nurse's
side. The instant, however, that the saintly little form
catches sight of her it is up on its bare legs, and rushing
towards her.

'Oh, Miss Lambton, do let me say my prayers to you!
it would be so pleasant!—No, Franky,' with a disposition
to hustle her little brother, who is putting in a like claim;
'you are too little; you can say yours to Nanny!'

As she speaks she pulls Peggy by the gown into the
room; and, placing her in a chair, kneels down at once—so
that there may be no chance of her escaping—beside her,
with hands devoutly folded, but a somewhat roving eye.

'Which shall I say?' asks she, with a wriggle of the
back and an air of indifference: '"Our Father" or "Gentle
Jesus"?'

'Do you think that there would be any harm in my
praying for John Talbot?'

Margaret gives a little jump. It is, then, an hereditary
passion! But she answers drily:

'Not the least.'

Another pause. The wriggling has ceased.

'Only,' pursues Peggy, quite determined not to supply
the form of petition for Talbot's welfare, 'only you must say
it out of your own head. I am not going to tell you what
to say.'

'Oh, then,' with an air of resolution, 'I had better say,
"God bless John Talbot; and I am glad he is here."'

She has pronounced this last somewhat eccentrically-[Pg 67]worded
supplication rather loud, and at the end of it her
wandering eye takes in an object which makes her spring
from her knees as hastily as she had done before.

'Oh! there is John Talbot!' cries she, tearing out barefoot
into the passage, and flinging herself into his arms.

'I have been praying for you!' cries she, hugging him.
'Miss Lambton said that I might.'

At this unexpected colouring given to her reluctant
permission Peggy reddens.

'I said that there was no harm in it,' explains Peggy
hurriedly; 'there is no harm in praying for any one.'

'And the more they need it the greater charity it is,'
replies he, looking at her with so sad and deprecating a
humility that her anger against him melts.

CHAPTER IX

'God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the Purest of
Humane pleasures. It is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirit of Man;
Without which Buildings and Pallaces are but Grosse Handy-works: And
man shall ever see that when Ages grow to Civility and Elegancie they
come to Build Stately, sooner than to Garden Finely: as if Gardening
were the Greater Perfection.'

I do not know whether Peggy had ever read Bacon, but
she certainly endorsed his opinion.

'The garden is the only really satisfactory thing,' she
says to herself, three days after that on which she had
conducted Miss Harborough's devotions, as she stands
beside her carnation-bed, and notes how many fat buds
have, during the night, broken into pale sulphur and
striped and blood-red flowers.

To few of us, I think, has not at one time or other of
our lives the doubt presented itself, whether the people we
love are not a source of more pain than pleasure to us,
what with their misfortunes, their ill-doings, and their
deaths. But despite frost, and snail, and fly, and
drought, and flood, the joy in a garden must always
enormously exceed the pain. The frost may shrivel the
young leaves, but the first sun-kiss brings out green
successors; the drought may make the tender herbs bow
and droop, but at the next warm rain-patter they look
up again. The frost that nips our human hearts often
no after-sunbeam can uncongeal; and the rain falls too[Pg 69]
late to revive the flower that the world's cruel drought
has killed.

'Did you find out how soon they are going?' asks Prue
breathlessly, running down the road to meet her sister on
her return from the Manor, in her eagerness to get her
tidings.

It has been the one thought that has filled her mind
during the three hours of Margaret's absence. Peggy
shakes her head despondently.

'Milady did not know.'

'I suppose that they had gone out riding before you
got there.'

This is not a question, so Margaret thinks herself exempted
from the necessity of answering it.

'Had they gone out riding before you got there?' repeats
Prue, with feverish pertinacity.

It is a question now, so she must make some reply. She
only shakes her head.

'Then you saw them set off?'—very eagerly. 'How
did she look? beautiful, I am sure!'

'I did not see them.'

It is a moment before the younger girl takes in what
the last sentence implies; then she says in a changed low
key:

'You mean to say that they did not go out riding at
all?'

'No,' replies Peggy, softly putting her arm round her
sister's shoulders, as if she would ward off the imminent
trouble from her by that kind and tender gesture; 'they
did not go out riding at all; they sat in the park together
instead.'

Prue has snatched herself out of Peggy's arms, and
drawn up her small willowy figure.

'He shall not have the chance of playing fast and loose
with me again in a hurry,' she says, her poor face burning.

Alas! he would have the chance next day, if he chose
to take it; but he does not even take the trouble to do
that. Two whole days pass, and nothing is either seen or
heard of him. And through these two long days Prue,
with flagging appetite and fled sleep, rejecting occupation,
starting at the sound of the door-bell, watches for him;
and Peggy watches too, and starts, and is miserable for
company.

During those weary two days Prue's mood changes a
hundred times, varying from pitiful attempts at a dignified
renunciation of him, always ending in a deluge of tears, to
agonised efforts at finding excuses for his neglect, and
irritation at her sister for not being able to say that she
thinks them sufficing ones.

'He is so hospitable,' she says wistfully, as the sun sets
upon the second empty day; 'he has almost exaggerated
ideas of what he owes to his guests. And after all, there
is no one else to entertain them. Milady does not trouble
her head about them; he has such good manners; he is so
courteous! Come now, prejudiced as you always are
against him, you yourself have often said, "How courteous
he is!"' Then, as Peggy makes but a faint and dubious
sign of acquiescence, she adds irritably: 'Whether you
own it or not, you have said so repeatedly; but there is
no use in talking to a person who blows hot and cold, says
one thing to-day and another to-morrow.'

The third morning has come. In the garden, dew-crisped
and odorous, but whose spicy clove-carnation
breath brings no solace to her careless nostril, Prue sits
bent and listless, her fragile prettiness dimmed, and the
nosegay of her choicest flowers—usually most grudgingly[Pg 71]
plucked—extravagantly gathered by Margaret five minutes
ago, in the hope that their morning beauty may tempt her
sick chick to a smile, lying disregarded on the grass beside
her, and sniffed at by Mink, who makes a face of unaffected
disgust at the mignonette.

'He has never in his life been so long without coming
to see us when he was at home,' says Prue dejectedly;
'once he was thirty-six hours, but that was accounted for
afterwards by his having had one of his neuralgic headaches.
Do you think'—with a little access of life and
animation—'that he can be ill?'

'It is possible, of course,' replies Margaret gravely;
'but I do not think it is probable.'

'If I could only know,' says the other wearily; 'if I
could be sure; it would be something to be sure of anything!
I am so tired of wondering!'

'I might go up to the Big House to find out for you,'
suggests Peggy, magnanimously swallowing down her own
acute distaste to this proposition, and speaking with a
cheerful relish, as if she liked it. 'I could easily make an
excuse to go up to the Big House; shall I go?'

The capricious poppy colour has sprung back into Prue's
thin cheek.

'Oh, if you would!'

'Of course I will,' replies Margaret gaily; 'it will be a
nice walk for me; the garden makes me so lazy about
walking. What time shall I go? morning or afternoon?'

'Oh, if you did not mind, morning is the soonest.'

The words are scarcely out of her mouth before ting,
tang! sharply sounds the hall-door bell. It is a bell that
is hardly ever pulled in a forenoon, save by one person—a
person who does not confine himself to the canonical
hours of calling.

In a moment there is a light in Prue's dimmed eyes,
and Margaret's great blue ones beam for company.[Pg 72]

'I think that I need not go up to the Big House, after
all,' she says, with soft gladness.

'Shall I go away,' asks Prue, in a trembling whisper,
'and not come back for ten minutes or so? Perhaps he
would think better of me if I did not seem so eager to
meet him. Shall I?'

'I think I would not,' answers Peggy gently; 'I would
sit quietly here, just as if nothing had happened. I think
it would be more dignified.'

They wait in silence. What a long time Sarah is in
putting on a clean apron and turning down her sleeves!
But he is admitted at last, has passed through the house,
and is stepping across the turf towards them.

He! But what he? Alas for Prue! there are more
he's than one in the world—more he's that call at uncanonical
hours!

'Oh, Peggy!' she says, with almost a sob, 'it is only
John Talbot! It is not he after all.'

Peggy does not answer. Her feelings, though nearly as
poignant as her sister's, are a good deal more complex.
An indignation for which she can perfectly account, and
an agitation for which she can give herself no reason at all,
make her disappointment, though not far from being as
bitter, less simple than Prue's.

She advances to meet her visitor with an air that
would make a more impudent heart than his sink.
Over her face is written, though the words do not
actually pass her lips, that least reassuring of salutations,
'To what are we indebted for the honour of this
visit?'

A woman's anger is seldom wholly reasonable, and on
this occasion Margaret's indignation against Talbot is called
forth not only by his being himself, but by his not being
Freddy Ducane, which is certainly more his misfortune
than his fault. After all, he is, for a villain, not possessed[Pg 73]
of very much effrontery, since the austerity of so young an
eye strikes him dumb.

The only person who shows him any civility is Mink,
who, being of a rather superficial character, is glad of any
addition to his social circle, and does not inquire too nicely
into its quality.

It is probable that Talbot, being a man of the world,
would have recovered the use of his tongue in time; but
as he is rather slow about it, Margaret takes the initiative.

'Is it something about the village concert?' she asks.

He looks puzzled.

'The village concert! I am afraid that I have not
heard anything about the village concert.'

'Oh!' returns she, coldly surprised. 'I thought that
probably Lady Roupell had asked you to leave a message
with me about it. It is not that, then?'

She continues to look expectantly at him. Since it is
not that, it must be on some other errand he has come.
She clearly thinks it an impossible impertinence on his
part to have called on her at eleven o'clock in the morning
without an excuse.

And yet such is the case. He has come because he has
come; he has no better reason to give, either to her or to
himself. A wild idea of trumping up the expected message,
and another of feigning that he has come to inquire after
the fox, cross his mind; but he dismisses both: the first
because he knows he should be found out, and the second
because Miss Lambton might take it as a fresh demand
upon her pity for the wound got in her service.

'I am afraid I have no message,' he says boldly. 'I
was passing your door, and I—I—rang. By the bye'
(smiling nervously as the utter inadequacy of his explanation
falls upon his ears), 'what a loud bell yours is! I
was so frightened at the noise I made that I was half
inclined to run away when I had rung it.'[Pg 74]

She does not say that she is glad he did not; she does
not say anything civil. She only asks him to sit down,
which, when he has shaken hands with Prue, and wondered
inwardly what she can have been doing to make herself
look so odd, he does.

Again silence, and again it is broken by Margaret.
After all, she cannot be conspicuously rude even to him in
her own house. It is, indeed, one of the problems of life,
'When is it permissible to insult one's neighbour?' Not
in one's own house; not in his. There is, then, only the
open street left.

For the sake of saying something, and also because she
knows that she is giving voice to her sister's unspoken
wish, Peggy inquires civilly whether they are all well at
the Manor.

'Yes, I think so,' replies Talbot slowly. 'I have not
heard any of them complain of any disease beyond the long
disease of life.'

His tone is so little what one would expect from the
happy lover of a fashionable beauty, that Margaret, with
that charity that thinketh no evil, to which we are all so
prone, instantly sets it down to affectation.

'That is a disease that I daresay does not hinder you
all from amusing yourselves,' returns she sarcastically.

'Amusing ourselves? Oh yes, very well. I do not
complain.'

There is such an obviously true ring about the depression
with which this announcement of his contentment with his
lot is uttered, that even she can no longer doubt of its
reality. So he is not happy with his Betty after all!
And a very good thing, too! Serve him right! But
perhaps the discovery tends to mollify a little the tone of
her next observation.

'Are you thinking how badly we want mowing?' she
asks, her eyes following the direction of his, which are[Pg 75]
absently bent upon the sward, to-day not shorn to quite its
usual pitch of velvet nicety. 'So we do, indeed. But
Jacob has unluckily fallen ill, just as milady lent me the
machine, and there it and the pony stand idle, and we'—regretfully
eyeing her domain—'are, as you see, like a
hay-meadow.'

Talbot does not speak for a moment. A great idea is
labouring its way to birth in his mind—an idea that may
give him a better foothold here than any casually escaped
fox or precarious porterage of messages can ever do.

'Why should not I mow?' asks he at last.

'You?'

'Yes, I; and you lead the pony.'

She looks at him, half inclined to be angry.

'Is that a joke?'

'A joke—no! Will you tell me where the pony is?
May I harness it?'

Again she looks at him, waveringly this time, and
thence to her turf. It is already an inch and a half too
long; by to-morrow morning it will be three inches, an
offence to her neat eye; and when Jacob falls ill he is apt
to take his time about it. She yields to temptation.

'I will call the boy.'

But the boy is out—marbleing, vagranting after his kind
about the near village, no doubt.

They have to harness the pony themselves; and by the
time that they have put the bridle over her head, inserted
her feet into her mowing shoes, and led her out of her
dark stall into the sunny day, John has almost recovered
the ground he had lost since that fortunate hour when,
with three drops of his blood, he had bought a square inch
of oil-silk and a heavenly smile.

They set off. Loudly whirs the machine. Up flies the
grass in a little green cloud, which the sun instantly turns
into deliciously scented new-mown hay; sedately steps the[Pg 76]
pony; gravely paces Margaret beside her; honourably
John stoops to his toil behind. It is not a pursuit that
lends itself much to conversation; but at least he has
continuously before his eyes her flat back, her noble
shoulders, the milky nape of her neck; and can conjecture
as to the length of her unbound hair by counting the
number of times that the brown plait winds round the
back of her broad head. Every now and then they pause
to empty out the grass, and each time a few words pass
between them.

'Is Jacob very ill?'

'I am afraid that he suffers a good deal.'

'Is he likely to die?'

'Heaven forbid!'

'Because if he is, I wish you would think of me.'

He is half afraid when he has said this; it verges,
perhaps, too nearly upon familiarity.

But she is not offended. Her eye, flattered by her
shaven lawn, cannot rest very severely upon him who has
shaven it for her. Her spirits have risen; exhilarated by
the wholesome exercise, by the sunshine, by who knows
what. Only when her look falls now and again upon
Prue, still flung listlessly on the garden-seat, with her
nosegay—not more flagging than she—withering on the
ground beside her, does a cloud come over it.

'Should I get a good character from your last place?'
returns she playfully.

'From the Foreign Office?'

'Was it the Foreign Office?' with a momentary impulse
of curiosity for which she instantly pulls herself up. 'You
know one always expects to get a character from the last
place.'

CHAPTER X

'Our Master hath a garden which fair flowers adorn, There will I go and gather, both at eve and morn: Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute, Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.

'The lily white that bloometh there is Purity, The fragrant violet is surnamed Humility: Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute, Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.'

'Well,' cries Peggy anxiously, as, the young men having
taken leave, she sees her sister come running and jumping,
and humming an air, to meet her, 'is it all right?'

'Of course it is all right,' replies Prue, vaulting over the
tennis-net to let off a little of her steam. 'If it had not
been for your long face, I should never have doubted it.'

'Yes?'

'It was just as I expected; he was too polite to leave
them. He says he never in his life remembers spending
two such tedious days; but he is so unselfish. He says
himself that he knows he is full of faults, but that he
cannot understand any one being selfish, even from the
point of view of their own pleasure. He said it so
simply.'

'H'm!'

'I was so sorry for you, Peggy—saddled with that
tiresome John Talbot all morning. Of course I ought to
have helped you; but you know I had not a word to throw[Pg 79]
to a dog. It was very provoking of him, wasting all your
morning for you.'

'My morning was not wasted,' rejoins Margaret calmly.
'He may be a very bad man, but he mows well.'

'He might as well have finished it while he was about
it,' says Prue, captiously eyeing the lawn. 'It looks almost
worse than it did before, half mown and half unmown.'

For an instant Margaret hesitates; then, with a slight
though perceptible effort over herself, she says:

'I suppose he thought so; for he has offered to come
again to-morrow to finish it. He said one could not leave
it half-shaven, like a poodle.'

She looks at her sister a little doubtfully as she speaks—as
one not quite sure of the soundness of the comparison,
and that would be glad to have it confirmed by another
judgment. But Prue's wings have already carried her up
again into her empyrean.

'We are to ride quite late this afternoon. He wants
me to see the reapers reaping by moonlight as we come
home. He says he always associates me with moonlight.
I am to ride the bay. He says he quite looks upon her as
mine—that it gives him a sort of turn to see any one else
on her;' and so on, and so on.

Margaret smiles rather sadly; but as it is no use going
to meet trouble half-way, she allows herself to be carried
away by Prue's infectious spirits, on however rickety a
foundation those spirits may be built. In her heart she is
scarcely more pleased with her own conduct than with
her sister's.

'One cannot touch pitch without being defiled,' she says
to herself severely.

She says it several times—is, indeed in the act of saying
it next morning, when, on the stroke of eleven, punctual
to his minute, the poor pitch reappears. She sets him at
once to his mowing, and allows him very short intervals[Pg 80]
for rest and conversation. Since he has come to work, let
him work. No doubt as soon as he discovers that it is
honest labour and not play that is expected of him he
will trouble her with no more of his assiduities. And yet,
as he bids her good-bye, leaving behind him a smooth
sweep of short velvet for her to remember him by, he
seems to linger.

'How is Jacob?' he asks.

'No better.'

'The garden looks a little straggly,' suggests he insidiously,
knowing her weak side. 'A great many things
want tying up. The beds need edging, and the carnations
ought to be layered.'

'You are very learned,' says she, smiling. 'Does the
F.O. teach you gardening?'

'Well, no; that is not included in the curriculum.
That is an extra.'

'Who did teach you, then?' asks she, with an inquisitiveness
which, as soon as the words are out of her mouth,
shocks and surprises herself.

Can it be Betty? A Betty that loves her children and
digs in her garden! If it is so, Peggy will have to reconstruct
her altogether.

'My sister.'

His sister! What a relief! It would have been so
humiliating to have had her strongest taste degraded by a
community with painted, posturing Betty.

'You have a sister?'

'Had. There is a good deal of difference.'

And with that he leaves her abruptly. But he returns
next day at the same hour; and, as there has blown a
boisterous wind in the night, which has prostrated top-heavy
plants, torn off leaves, and scattered flower-petals,
she has not the heart to refuse his aid in a general tidying
and sweeping up. Next day he clips the edges of the[Pg 81]
borders very nicely with a pair of shears; and the next
day they gather lavender off the same bush. Gathering
lavender, particularly off the same bush, is a good deal
more productive of talk than mowing; nor is it possible
to her to keep her new servant within the bounds of a silence
to which she had never attempted to confine her old one.

But, indeed, by the time that they have come to the
lavender day the wish for his silence has ceased. On the
second—the general sweeping day—he had told her about
his sister—had told her in short dry sentences how he had
lost her; and she had cried out of sympathy for him who
did not cry, and had said to herself, 'What if it had been
my Prue?' On the third day, though assuredly no word
or hint of Betty had passed his lips, somehow, by woman's
instinct, sharpened by observation, she has sprung to a
conclusion, not very erroneous, as to his garish mock-happiness
and his shattered life. On the fourth day she
asks herself why he never comes except in the forenoon;
and herself answers the question, that it is because lazy
Betty lies late, and until one o'clock has no knowledge of
his comings or goings. On the fifth day she resolves that
he shall come in the afternoon. She will be visited openly
or not at all. So when, giving his bundle of lavender into
her hands, he says with a valedictory formula, 'The same
hour to-morrow?' she answers quietly:

'I am afraid not; I have an engagement with Mrs.
Evans for to-morrow morning; we must give up the garden
to-morrow, unless'—as if with an afterthought—'unless
you could come later—some time in the afternoon?'

His countenance falls. What property has he in his
own afternoons? His weary afternoons of hammock and
scandal and cigarettes?

'I am afraid——' he begins; but at once he sees her
face hardening. She knows. She understands. Cost
what it may, he will not see again in her mouth and eyes[Pg 82]
that contempt whose dawning he had once before detected,
to the embittering of his rest. He will not leave her with
those tight lips and that stern brow. Pay for it as he may,
he will do her bidding.

'At what hour, then?' he asks readily. 'Four? five? it
is all one to me.'

She hesitates a moment. She has laid a trap for him,
and he has not fallen into it.

'Shall we say five?'

He sees the surprise in her look, and is rewarded by
it. But as he walks home he ponders. How is he to
break to Betty the act of insubordination of which he has
pledged himself to be guilty? For the last week he has
been leading a double life; dissembling his happy mornings
from the monopoliser of his weary afternoons. A sense of
shame and revolt comes over him. He will dissemble no
longer. Know as he may that from the tyranny whose
yoke he himself fastened about his neck—from the chain
which he himself has encouraged to eat into his life, only
death or Betty's manumission can—according to honour's
distorted code—free him; yet there is no reason why he
should deny himself the solace of such a friendship as a
good woman who divines his miserable story will accord
him: a woman who lies under no delusion as to his being
a free agent; in whose clear eyes—their innocence not
being a stupid ignorance—he has read her acquaintance
with his history; and whose strong heart can run no
danger from the company of one whom she despises. Nor
as the time draws near, though the natural man's aversion
from vexing anything weaker than itself, coupled with his
knowledge of his lady's unusual tear-and-invective power,
may make him wince at the thought of the coming contest,
does his resolution at all flag as to asserting and sticking to
his last remnant of liberty. He might, as it happens, have
cut the knot by flight, Betty having given him the occasion[Pg 83]
by forsaking him for a game of billiards with Freddy; but
he is determined to fight the battle out on the open field.
She has rejoined him now, and the weather being fresher than
it was, and Betty the chilliest of mortals, they are walking
briskly up and down the terrace, she wrapped in a 'fluther'
of lace and feathers, and with her children frisking round her,
a good and happy young matron. She is very happy just now,
dear Betty. She has beaten Freddy at billiards, and made
him break tryst with Prue. She is going to make him break
another to-morrow. Is it any wonder that she looks bright
and sweet? Little Franky has hold of her hand; and Lily
is backing along the gravel walk before her. Betty laughs.

'Can you imagine what can be the pleasure of walking
backwards with your tongue out?' asks she of Talbot.
'Franky darling, you are pulling my hand off; would not
you like to run away and play with Lily?'

But the little spoilt fellow only clutches her fingers the
tighter.

'No, no; I like to stay with you, mammy!'

'And so you shall,' cries she, hugging him; 'you shall
always do whatever you like. But Lily'—in a colder key—'you
may run away; we do not want you. What are
you staring at me so for, child?'

Lily puts her head on one side, and hoisting up her
shoulder to meet her cheek, rubs them gently together,
with her favourite gesture.

'I was only thinking, mammy,' replies she pensively,
'what much smaller ears than yours Miss Lambton has.
Do you think that she will grow deaf sooner than other
people because her ears are so small?'

'Nonsense!' rejoins the mother sharply; 'do not get
into the habit of asking stupid questions. Run away!'

'Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings,' etc. The
way has been paved for Talbot in a way that he could not
have expected. Miss Harborough walks away slowly,[Pg 84]
dragging her legs, and with a very deep reluctance. She
scents an interesting conversation in the air.

'It is odd that Lily should have mentioned Miss Lambton,'
says Talbot, taking the plunge; 'for I was just going to
mention her myself.'

'It is what you do not often do,' replies Betty drily;
'"out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh,"
cannot be said of you.'

'Her gardener is ill,' continues Talbot, leaving unnoticed
this little fling, and speaking in as matter-of-fact a tone as
he can assume; 'and I promised to help her to water her
garden. By the bye'—with an unnecessary glance at the
stable clock—'if you could spare me for half an hour—I
said I would be there by five—I ought to be off.'

There is an ominous silence. Then:

'How do you know that her gardener is ill? Did she
think it necessary to write and communicate that interesting
fact to you?'

'No.'

'She has not been here since Monday?'

'I believe not.'

'Then you have been there?'

'Yes.'

'What day?'

He hesitates. Shall he make a clean breast of it? Yes;
'in for a penny, in for a pound.'

'I have been there five days,' replies he slowly, and
looking down.

Another pause. He keeps his eyes resolutely averted
from her face, but he hears an angry catch in her breath.

'In the morning, I suppose, before I was up?'

'Yes.'

She breaks into a rather shrill laugh.

'What an incentive to early rising! The early Blowsabel
picks the worm.'[Pg 85]

Her tone is so inexpressibly insulting that he has to bite
his lips hard to keep in the furious retort that rises to them;
but he masters himself. Of what use to bandy words with
an angry woman? And, after all, from her point of view
she has some cause of complaint. Franky has altered his
mind, and trotted off after his senior, for whose tree-climbing,
cat-teasing, general mischief-doing powers he entertains a
respect tempered with fear. They are alone.

Betty is walking along with her nose in the air, a smile
of satisfied ire at the happiness of her last shaft giving a
malicious upward curve to her pretty mouth.

'How I should have laughed,' says she presently, 'if
any fortune-teller had told me that it would be my fate to
be supplanted by a sa——'

'You are going to say "a sack of potatoes,"' says he,
interrupting her. 'Do not. If you must call names,
invent a new one!'

'Why give myself that trouble,' asks she insolently,
'when the old one fits so admirably? Supplanted by a sack!'
(dwelling with prolonged relish on the obnoxious noun).
'What a good title for a novel! Ah! Freddy, my child!'
catching sight of the young fellow, who is just stepping out
of the window of the drawing-room. 'I was afraid you
had gone to dry your skeleton's eyes. Come and dry mine
instead: I assure you they need it much more.'

As she speaks she goes hurriedly to meet Ducane, and
disappears with him round a corner of the house.

Talbot is free to pursue his scheme with what heart he
may. The last ten minutes' conversation has taken all the
bloom off his project. That the whole pleasure to himself
has been eliminated from it is, however, no reason why he
should break his word to Peggy, and, if he wishes to obey
her with the punctuality that he has always hitherto shown,
he must set off at once. He begins to walk towards a
turn-stile that leads into the park!

CHAPTER XI

'Her cheeks so rare a white was on, No daisy makes comparison (Who sees them is undone); For streaks of red were mingled there, Such as are on a Catherine pear, The side that's next the sun.'

He has not gone above a hundred yards when he hears a
small thunder of feet behind him, and turning, finds Miss
Harborough flying at the top of her speed to overtake him.

'Mammy said I might go with you,' cries she breathlessly.

He stops and hesitates. Is it possible that she has sent
this innocent child to be an unconscious spy upon him?

'Mammy said I might go with you,' repeats Lily, seeing
his hesitation, and beginning to drop her long lashes,
and rub her cheek with her shoulder, according to her
most approved methods of fascination.

'But I did not say so,' returns he gravely.

'Oh, but you will,' cries she, flinging herself boisterously
into his arms; 'and I—I'll help you over the stiles.'

Who could resist such a bribe as this? Certainly not
Talbot. They walk off amicably hand-in-hand. After all,
he ought to be thankful for anything that distracts him
from his own thoughts, which are certainly neither pleasant
nor profitable enough to be worth thinking. To-day he is
sad, not only on his own account, but on Margaret's. Short
as has been the time of his acquaintance with her, he has[Pg 87]
got into a habit, which seems long, of being sorry with her
sorrows. He knows that to-day will be a black day for
Prue, and that Peggy will be darkened in company. Is it
not better then, seeing that he cannot stir a finger to lift
the weight from the three hearts he would fain lighten,
that he should have his eight-year-old companion's chatter
to be distracted by, that he should be initiated into the
hierarchy of her affections, and learn the order and degree
in which her relations and friends are dear to her? He is
surprised and flattered at the extremely high place assigned
to himself immediately after father, and some way
above mammy; but is less exhilarated on finding out that
he shares it with the odd-man, who has made and presented
a whistle to her.

'My dear little brother!' exclaims Lily, with an extravagant
affection of sisterly tenderness. 'I am so fond
of him! Poor little brother! he has no toys!'

John smiles rather grimly. He knows that Miss Lily
squabbles frightfully with her little brother in real life;
and how entirely mendacious is her statement as to his
destitution of playthings.

'I have given him most of mine,' pursues Lily, casting
one eye subtly up to watch the effect of her words, 'but
he has broken them nearly all, and now we neither of us
have any!'

John receives this broad hint in a silence which Miss
Lily feels to be sceptical; but as her attention is at the
same moment diverted by the sight of Miss Lambton's
Red House, and of Mink's face looking through the bars of
the gate, on the anxious watch for passing market-carts to
insult, she does not pursue the subject.

Mink takes them for a market-cart at first, and insults
them; but afterwards apologises, and shows them the way[Pg 88]
to the garden, jumping up at Lily's nose, with an affectation
of far greater pleasure than he can really feel.

They find his mistress standing alone in the middle of
her domain, a great gutta-percha snake lying on the ground
behind her, and the hose directed at a thirsty verbena-bed.

As they come up with her, the chiming church clock,
having finished its preliminary stave of 'Home, Sweet
Home,' strikes five. Whether the chimes or her own
thoughts have deafened her, she does not hear their
approach.

'Is not that punctuality?' asks Talbot, drawing near.
'Which is better, to have only one very small virtue, and
to have it in absolute perfection, or to have a smattering
of several large ones?'

At his voice she starts, and turns, her eye falling upon
him, and also, of course, upon the child. The latter instantly
flings herself into her arms.

'Mammy and John Talbot said I might come!' cries
she effusively.

'You did not give John Talbot much choice in the
matter,' returns he drily.

'But mammy told me to come,' urges Lily in eager
self-defence; 'she told me to run fast that I might be sure
to overtake you!'

John feels a dull red rising to his brow; but he will not
let his eyes sink: they meet Peggy's full and straight.
She shall see that this time, at all events, he has been
neither ashamed nor afraid to proclaim his visit to her.

Peggy has gently unclasped the child's arms from about
her neck.

'What a dear little doggy!' cries Lily, chattering on,
and deceived by Mink's manner, as all strangers are, into
the belief that he has conceived a peculiar fancy for her.
'What is his name?'

'That is what no one—not even himself—has ever been
able to make out,' returns Margaret, with a smile. 'Sometimes
he thinks that he is a Yorkshire terrier, and sometimes
he does not. I bought him at the Dogs' Home, because he
was the most miserable little dog there, and because I was
quite certain that if I did not, nobody else would. He has
grown so uppish now that sometimes I have to remind him
of his origin—have not I, Minky?'

'Mammy had a Yorkshire terrier once,' says Miss
Harborough thoughtfully—'John Talbot gave it her—but
he died. She had him stuffed: he looks horrid now!'

Talbot writhes. It seems to him as if he had never
before tasted the full degradation of his position. He
makes a clumsy plunge at changing the conversation by
inquiring after Prue.

'She is lying down,' replies Peggy, while he sees a
furrow come upon her white forehead. 'The heat tries
her; at least'—her eye meeting his with a sort of appeal—'she
is very easily tired; and she has been waiting all
afternoon with her habit on. She was engaged to go out
riding at three, and now it is five; people ought not to
make engagements if they are not prepared to keep them!'

'I am afraid he had forgotten all about it,' answers
Talbot sadly.

Margaret's only answer is a dispirited shrug; and Lily
having by this time scampered off to visit the fox; if
possible, with safety, pull his brush; eat anything that is
eatable in the kitchen-garden; and make friendly advances
to the stable-boy—Miss Lambton again takes up the hose.

'This,' says she, looking at it affectionately, 'is the one
solid good I have ever got from the Big House!'

He does not answer. Though he certainly does not
class himself under the head of a solid good, her words give
him a vague chill.[Pg 90]

'It sounds ungrateful,' pursues Peggy; 'but I often
wish we could move this acre of ground, with everything
that is on it, fifty miles farther away.'

'Do you?'

'Of course,' pursues she gravely, 'we get a great deal
more society here than we should anywhere else; but I
often think that that is a doubtful good. We grow to
know people whose acquaintance we should be far better
without.'

He winces. Does he himself come under this category?
But she means no offence.

'You can have no notion how our lives are cut up,' she
continues. 'We live in a whirl of tiny excitements, that
would not be excitements to anybody but us. We never
can settle to any serious occupation; the moment we take
up a book there is a note: "Prue, come out riding;"
"Peggy, come and look over the accounts of the Boot and
Shoe Club;" "Peggy and Prue, come and dine to meet
the—the——"'

Harboroughs is the name which rises to her lips, and
which she suppresses out of politeness to him.

He knows, too, that the plural pronoun which she has
employed throughout has been used only as a veil for
Prue's weakness; that the picture she has drawn has no
likeness to her own steady soul.

'I sometimes think seriously of moving,' she says presently.
'It would be a wrench'—looking round wistfully.
'The only two big things that ever happened to me have
happened here: Prue was born here, and mother died here.
Yes, it would be a wrench.'

He listens to her in a respectful silence. It would be
impertinent in him to express overt sympathy in her trouble,
the trouble she has never put into words.

'Sometimes I think that we should do better in London,'
she goes on, looking at him almost as if appealing to him[Pg 91]
for counsel; 'there would be more to interest and distract
us in London.'

'What, and leave the garden?' says he, lifting his
eyebrows.

'She does not care really about the garden,' answers
Margaret, forgetting herself, and using the singular pronoun
which she might have employed all along. 'And as for
me'—with a little laugh—'I would grow mignonette in a
box; and buy a load of hay, as I heard of one country-sick
lady doing, and make myself a haycock in the back-yard.'

'I cannot fancy you in a town,' says he, almost under
his breath.

It is true. It is impossible to him to picture her except
with a background of waving trees, a floor of blossoming
flowers, a spicy wind to toss her hair, and finches to sing to
her. His imagination is not strong enough to transplant
her to the narrow bounds of a little South Kensington home,
lost in the grimy monotony of ten thousand others.

'It is very difficult to know what to decide,' she says,
almost plaintively, 'and I have no one to advise me.
Though I am not very young—twenty-two—I have very
little experience of life. There must be a best; but it is
hard to find. Do you never feel it so?'

Her large pure eyes are upon him, asking him, as well
as her mouth does, for an answer to this unanswerable
question. For a moment he hesitates, then:

'Do not you know that there are some people who have
arranged their lives so ingeniously that for them there is
no best; that the only choice left them lies between bad
and worse?'

'I do not believe it,' answers she solemnly. 'God gives
us all a best, if we will only look for it; and' (in a lighter
key) 'never fear but I shall find mine before I have done!'

After that they finish their watering almost in silence.
When he bids her good-bye, having recaptured his Miss[Pg 92]
Harborough, who is restored to him a good deal smirched
by a delirious half-hour in the hayloft with a litter of
kittens, Margaret thanks him simply, yet very heartily, for
his services to her.

'Why are you so grateful to-day particularly?' asks he,
alarmed. 'You make me feel as if the band were playing
"God Save the Queen," and everything was at an end.'

'Jacob comes back to his work to-morrow,' answers she,
'and you know,' with a smile, 'I cannot afford to keep two
gardeners.'

'He must be very weak still.'

'Do not be afraid,' laughing again; 'I will not overwork
him.'

'Then I am to consider myself dismissed?'

'With thanks—yes.'

'Out of work? Turned into the street?'

'Yes.'

'And without a character?'

'I daresay you will not miss it,' replies she, a little
cynically. 'Many people do without one.'

He winces. She is not half so nice when she is cynical.

'Come along, Lily,' he says, in a vexed voice; 'we are
not wanted here any longer. We are old shoes, sucked
lemons, last year's almanacs. Let us go.'

'My child!' cries Margaret, her eye falling for the first
time on a gigantic rift in the front of Miss Harborough's
frock, 'what have you done to yourself? What will
Nanny say to you?'

'I do not care what she says!' replies Lily swaggeringly.
'She is an old beast! Oh, Miss Lambton,' with a sudden
change of key, 'may not I come again to-morrow? Alfred
wants me to come again to-morrow.' (Alfred is the stable-boy.)
'May not I come with John Talbot again to-morrow?'

'You see that we are both of one mind,' says John,
with a melancholy whine, walking off with his young lady.

CHAPTER XII

The Harboroughs' and Talbot's invitation to the Manor
had been for a fortnight. Of that fortnight fully a week
has already elapsed. To the house which comes next in
the Harboroughs' autumn programme John Talbot has, by
some strange oversight, not been asked. For this reason—to
mark her indignation at so flagrant a departure from
the code of civilised manners—Betty shows every symptom
of an intention to throw up her engagement.

But for once Mr. Harborough's love of sport exceeds
his pliability. From a house which possesses some of the
best grousing on the Yorkshire moors, not even the fact
that his wife's admirer is not bidden to share it can keep
him; and what is more, as it is an old-fashioned house
which expects to see husband and wife together, he will
make Betty go too.

Talbot's engagements are more elastic. By an easy
readjustment of them he might spare another seven days
to his present quarters. It is true that Lady Roupell has
not as yet definitely asked him to prolong his visit, but he
knows that she is hardly aware whether he goes or stays;
and as to Freddy, he is always brimming over with an
easy hospitality which costs him nothing, and makes every
one say what a good fellow he is.

A whole week of absolute freedom, afternoons as well
as mornings; a whole week during which he need not
pretend to be jealous—pretend to be fond—pretend to be[Pg 94]
everything that he once was, and is not, and never will be
again! It is possible, too, that Jacob may have a relapse.
In that case, a whole week of mowing, of clipping edges,
of picking lavender, and gathering groundsel for the cage-birds!
He knows that there must always be eleven bits
gathered, because there are eleven birds, and she cannot
bear one to be without. He smiles softly at this tender-hearted
puerility of hers.

And meanwhile, since she has made it clear to him
that she does not desire any more of his immediate company,
he keeps himself away for two whole days. What business
has he, who can never claim any rights over her, to expose
her, by his assiduities, to the coarse gossip of a gaping
village?

But though his eye is not enriched by her, her presence
and her words are with him night and day. One of her
sentences rings for ever in his ears—'God gives us all a
best, if we will only look for it.' Look for it as he may, how
can he find his best? and finding, how dare he take hold
of and make it his? His best! The best for him—does
not it apparently stare him in the face?

To shake off this chain that was once of flowers, and is
now of cold eating iron, and to walk the world a free man,
free for honest work and honest love. Ay, but to the
riveting of that chain there went an oath, from which the
mere fact of his having grown tired of wearing its fetters
does not, in his opinion, release him. He is bound by an
engagement the more perversely sacred, because none can
hold him to it.

Only by her with whom it was made can he be emancipated
from it; and for that emancipation how can he ask
her? How can he go to her and say, 'I have grown tired
of you; I have grown fond of another woman. Let me
go!'

It is only as a free gift from her hand that he can accept[Pg 95]
his dismissal; and, of the improbability of her ever making
him that gift, his sinking spirit assures him. It is not
only vanity and habit that tie her to him. Deep in his
heart he knows that, cold wife, partial mother, bad friend
as she is, to him she has been, and is, a fond and faithful
lover; that, if he were but to hold up his finger, she would
toss to the winds position, diamonds, toilettes, admirers,
everything that for her life holds of valuable, to face
opprobrium and poverty by his side. He knows that he
and Franky are the two things in the world she really
loves, and for whom her foolish heart beats as truly under
its worldly 'fluther' of lace and satin as did ever Cornelia's
for her Gracchi, or Lucretia's for her lord.

It is absolutely impossible that he can cut her adrift.
Bitterly unsatisfactory, wrong, senseless, and now oppressive
as is the connection that binds him to her, he must hope
for none other, none better, none dearer, as long as her
and his lives last.

Such being the case, is not it the height of unwisdom to
himself, perhaps of injustice to that other woman, that he
should seek her company with the consciousness of a heart
he dare not give, and a hand he dare not offer?

This is the question that dings perpetually in his ears,
as he lies down and as he rises up, as he walks moody and
alone in the park, as he answers Lily's startling questions,
and evades her broad hints; or listens to Betty's anathemas
of her man-milliner, or her petulant lamentations over the
expected loss of his society during the ensuing week.

He has not yet answered it on the third day after his
last visit to the little Red House, when he meets Peggy in
the lane, staggering under a philanthropic load of framed
lithographs, which he helps her to carry to the workhouse,
and to hang up on the walls, whose dreary monotony of
whitewash they agreeably and gaudily vary. He has not
yet answered it the next day, when he carries a message to[Pg 96]
her from Lady Roupell, a message which must be preposterously
long, since it takes two hours and a half to deliver;
he has not yet answered it on the day after, nor on the
day after that again, which is the last of the Harboroughs'
visit.

On the afternoon of that day some business has brought
Peggy reluctantly up to the Manor, where she had not
appeared for above a week. John and Lily, as is but civil,
escort her home again! It is true that Miss Harborough
has had a near shave, at the moment of setting off, of
being recaptured by her nurse—a danger from which she
has been rescued only by her own presence of mind, a
presence of mind made all the acuter by her excessive
desire to flirt with John, and to overhear what—unintended
for Lilyan ears—he has to say to his companion.

'Oh, Miss Lambton!' cries she, pulling down Peggy's
face in order to whisper importantly into her ear; 'do not
you think I had better come with you? There are the
stiles! I do not see,' with an affectation of excessive
delicacy, 'how you are to get over the stiles with only
John Talbot!'

Her plea is admitted as sound.

They all three spend a long dawdling afternoon at the
Little House. They take the fox out for a run in the field
on his chain; and in his joy he gallops round and round,
tying all their legs together, even throwing Miss Harborough
down—an accident which fills her with delight. He offers
to play with Mink, who growls, and receives his advances
with such hauteur that he has to be reminded of the
humility of his own beginnings, and of the Dogs' Home.
The snubbed fox throws himself on the sward and pants,
swishing his brush from side to side like a cross cat.
Then they restore him to his prison, at which he opens his
red mouth wide, making little angry wild noises.

After they have done with the fox, they have still the[Pg 97]
garden to water; the kittens in the hayloft—to which they
ascend, on the joint invitation of Alfred and Lily—to see;
peas to throw to the pretty prosy pigeons, long-windedly
courting in fans and pouts, and prism-coloured throats on
the dove-cot roof. And when at length her guests take
their tardy leave, Peggy is insensibly lured, step by step,
into accompanying them more than half-way home.

Into what could not such an evening lure one? Through
a barley-field first; all the pale spears slanting westward in
the level sun; then a field of old pasture, knapweeds
purpling, little hawkweed clocks telling the time in
fairyland, loitering buttercups. Then a hedgerow with
woody nightshade and long blue vetch; then the green
night of a little wood. Though the sun is nearing his
declension, the delicious smell that all day long he has
compelled the grass and the flowers to bring him, in
odorous tribute, still tarries, making the air rich—âcre, as
the French say; a word for which there is no precise
English equivalent. On the farther side of the tiny forest
they part; if so short a severance can indeed be called to
part. Are not they to meet again in an hour or so, at that
dinner-party at the Manor, to which both Peggy and Prue
are bidden? and even if it were not so, have not they
to-morrow, and again to-morrow, and yet to-morrow again,
to look forward to? This being so, why is it that such a
curious last-time feeling clings to Talbot as he crosses the
park with his little chattering comrade, making him turn
his head again and again in futile seeking towards the
sylvan gate whence his tall and white-gowned friend has
already disappeared?

On entering the house, and going through an upper
passage to his room, he is accosted by Betty's maid, who
tells him that her ladyship's headache is better; that she
is on the sofa in Lady Roupell's boudoir, and that she has
expressed a wish to see him as soon as he comes in. He[Pg 98]
follows with a guilty conscience and a sinking heart. Has
he for one moment of his long blissful afternoon remembered
the headache, to which alone he owed his
freedom; the headache genuine enough—though it took
its birth from mortification and spleen—to keep her
stretched in pain and solitary darkness the livelong day?
She is in semi-darkness still, her windows closed (a
headache always makes her chilly); not a glint of apricot
cloud or suave blue sky-field reaching her. A sense of
pity, largely touched with remorse, comes over him, as he
takes her hand, and says softly:

'You are better at last? Come, that is well!'

She leaves her hand, languid and rather feverish, lying
in his.

'It is time that I should be better!' she says, with an
impatient sigh. 'What a day I have had!—our last day!'
There is such genuine grief and regret in the accent with
which she pronounces the three final words that his
remorse deepens; but that increase of self-reproach does
not make it the least more possible to him to echo her
lamentation. 'I asked Julie how often you had been to
inquire after me,' continues she, turning her eyes, innocent
to-day of their usual black smouches, interrogatively upon
him; 'she said she could not remember.'

Talbot blesses the wisely ambiguous maid; and, to hide
his confusion, stoops his head over the hand, which he still—since
it is evidently expected of him—holds.

'I wish my inquiries could have made you better,' says
he, taking—and feeling with shame that he is taking—a
leaf out of Julie's book. 'I am afraid that you will not be
able to come down to dinner.'

'Oh, but I shall!' returns she sharply. 'Why do you
think I shall not? Is the wish father to the thought?'

He laughs constrainedly, taking refuge in what is often
the best disguise, truth.[Pg 99]

'Yes, that is it!'

'Milady would never forgive me,' pursues she, rolling
her head restlessly about upon the cushions, 'if I left her
to struggle with the natives alone; I am sure I have not
the heart to struggle with any one! Oh, how miserable I
am! John!'—laying her other hand on his, and clasping
it between both hers—'how am I to get through the next
fortnight?'

Talbot wonders whether the burning blush that he feels
searing him all through his body shows in his face, whether
he looks the double-faced cur that he feels. Probably he
does not, or else the faint light helps him; for she goes on
unsuspiciously:

'You have never told me where you have decided to go
to-morrow—to the Mackintoshes or the Delaneys? If you
ask my advice,' with a rather showery smile, 'I should say
the Delaneys; for you will be less well amused there, and
have more time to think of me! Remember that you have
not given me your address; give it me now, lest you
should forget it!'

The tug of war has come. He would rather have put it
off until her headache was gone—until he could meet her
upon more equal terms. What chance has a man against
a woman lying on a sofa with her eyes full of tears, and
a handkerchief wetted with eau-de-Cologne tied round her
aching brows? None. His hesitation is so obvious that
she cannot but notice it.

'Well,' she says, with some sharpness, 'why do not you
answer me? Where is the difficulty?'

He laughs artificially.

'The difficulty,' he says, trying to speak carelessly—'the
difficulty is that there is no difficulty. You have my
address already. I am going to stay here!'

He has deposited his box of dynamite: he has now
only to wait for the explosion. But for twenty or thirty[Pg 100]
heart-beats she remains entirely silent, and, at the end of
that time, only repeats his own words:

'To—stay—here!'

'Yes.'

Another silence. He begins to wish that the explosion
would come. It would at least be better than this. She
has sat up on her sofa, and pushed back the wet bandage
from her damp and straightened hair. She has neither
belladonna nor rouge. He has always strongly deprecated
and even reviled the use of either; and yet he cannot help
thinking, though he hates himself for so thinking, that she
looks old and haggard without them.

'And this,' says she at last, speaking between her teeth
in a low voice, 'is your delicate way of intimating to me
that I am superseded!'

He has risen to his feet. They stand staring each at
each in the twilight room, the one not whiter than the
other. How much worse it is than he had feared! Close
outside the window a robin is piping blithely. A stupid
wonder flashes across his mind as to whether he is one
of those for whom Peggy scatters crumbs on her window-sill.

'I think that that is a question not worth answering,'
he replies, trying to speak calmly.

'But all the same it must be answered,' rejoins she, with
symptoms of rising excitement. 'You shall not leave the
room until it is answered.'

'Will you please to repeat it then in a more intelligible
form?' asks he, with a forced composure.

For a moment she glares at him with dead-white face
and shining eyes; then, rising from her sofa, flings herself
into his arms.

'How can you expect me to say such words twice?'
cries she, bursting into a tempest of tears; 'but if it is so,
tell me the truth. You have always blamed me for not[Pg 101]
speaking truth; learn your own lesson: tell me the truth.
Is it all over—all at an end?'

She has withdrawn herself again from him, and now
stands holding him at arm's length, a hand upon each
shoulder, her dimmed eyes fixed upon his face, searching
for the least sign of faltering or evasion upon it. But she
finds none.

'You know,' he answers, in a low quiet voice, whose
gentleness is the cover for a bottomless depression, 'that
there will never be an end to it until you make one.'

Something in his tone dries her tears.

'Then why do you want to stay here?' asks she, her
voice still shaking from her late gust of passion.

He is silent. Her words find an echo in his own heart.
Why indeed? Seen in the hell-light of his renewed
bondage, his plan for that one little halcyon week ahead
seems to him to have been a monstrosity of folly and
unreason. How could he, for even a moment, have entertained
it?

Betty has sat down again upon the sofa; and wiping
rather viciously the eyes in which an ireful light is flashing,
she says softly, as if she were saying something rather
pleasant:

'I am sure you would not wish to hurt her, or blight her
young affections; and yet it seems to me that you are on
the high-road to do both.'

He writhes, but he could not speak, if flaying alive were
to be the penalty of his dumbness.

'I do not think'—still in that silky key—'that you
have any right to turn the poor thing's head with attentions
such as she has probably never received before.'

At that he laughs out loud, and insultingly:

'Turn her head! Ha! ha!'

'It is very amusing, no doubt,' rejoins Betty, her false
suavity giving way to a most real fury, breast heaving, and[Pg 102]
colour rising, 'and such hilarity becomes you extremely;
but, as she has probably never seen any one more attractive
than the village apothecary, it would be no great excess of
coxcombry on your part to suppose that you might be
his successful rival.'

But this taunt fails to extract any reply. Exasperated
by her insuccess in driving him into angry speech, she
goes on:

'I do not think you have had to complain of her rigour;
how many days'—with an innocent air of inquiry—'has
she allowed you to mow her lawn, and milk her cow, and
feed her pig for her? Six? Seven? I suppose you have
been with her to-day, too?'

At that he unwisely abandons his fortress of silence,
and speaks:

'You had better ask Lily; you have set her on more
than once as a spy. Have your child in and ask her!'

To this cold and withering taunt her own weaker
sarcasms succumb; and again abandoning all self-control,
she bursts into an agony of weeping, burying her head in
the sofa-cushions, and convulsed from head to foot by her
sobs.

'Is it any wonder,' she moans, 'that I do not want to
see the only thing I have in the world go from me? What
am I saying?'—pulling herself up suddenly—'how dare I
say the only thing? have not I my Franky? I shall
always have my Franky!'

The grief of her tone is so poignant and so real that his
heart softens to her, despite her former gibes. He lays his
hand upon her shoulder.

'What is all this about?' he asks kindly. 'You know
as well as I do that you will have me—such as I am—as
long as you choose to keep me!'

'Then you will not stay here?' cries she precipitately,
quitting her desperate posture, and springing back with[Pg 103]
startling suddenness into life and animation again; 'then
you will go to-morrow?'

There is a pause. He walks to the window. Through
it there comes the peaceful sound of bleating sheep; and
the distant sharp bark of a little dog. Can it be Mink?
He has a sharp bark. Poor little Mink! He will probably
never see Mink again. And to-morrow, according to Peggy,
Mink had promised to tell them all about the Dogs' Home!

He smiles transiently at the recollection of her childish
jest. How many things they were to have done to-morrow!
Then he walks slowly back from the window and says:

'I will go to-morrow!'

Perhaps there is something in the tone of this concession
which takes away from the value of it, for Betty begins to
sob again; this time more in wrath than in sorrow.

'I do not think you need make such a favour of it; I
do not think it is much to ask, considering all things—considering
how I have com—com—compromised my
reputation for your sake for the last five years!' cries she
hysterically.

He does not defend himself; only a thought, whose
want of generosity shocks him, flashes across his mind, that
that was already a fait accompli when he had first made
her acquaintance.

'We know that there is no harm in our friendship,'
pursues she, a slight red staining her tear-washed cheeks;
'but nobody else knows it. The world is always only too
pleased to think the worst, and in one sense'—again
mastered by her emotion—'it is right! I would have
given up anything—everything for you—you know I would!
and you—you—will give up nothing for me, not even
such a trifle as this!'

Once again pity gets the upper hand of him; but a pity
crossed by such a bottomless regret and remorse at having
let himself slide into this tangled labyrinth of wrong, when[Pg 104]
honour and dishonour have changed coats, and he does
not know which is which, as the Lost Souls in Hell, if such
there be, might feel in looking back upon their earthly
course.

'You are right,' he says; 'we must do the best we can
for each other! We must not make life harder for one
another than it already is. I will do what you wish! I
ought! I will! Such a trifle, too!'

CHAPTER XIII

'At length burst in the argent revelry,With plume, tiara and all rich array,Numerous as shadows haunting fairilyThe brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gayOf old Romance.'

The 'argent revelry' has burst into the Manor in the
shape of what Lady Roupell, with more vigour than elegance,
is apt to call one of her 'Beast Parties,' i.e. one of
those miscellaneous gatherings of the whole neighbourhood
to which she thinks herself bound twice or thrice in the
year—gatherings which, though dictated by hospitality,
are not usually very successful. It is Lady Roupell's
principle to override all the small social distinctions of the
neighbourhood, to invite all the people who quarrel, all
the people who look down upon each other, all the people
who are bored by one another, all the people who are trying
to avoid each other, to hobnob at her bounteous board.

'They all go to God's house together, my dear; why
should not they come to mine?' asks she, with a logic that
she thinks unanswerable. And so they do; but they do not
enjoy themselves.

That, however, is no concern of milady's. The 'Beasts'
must like to talk to one another, or, if they do not, they
ought to like it.

Having thrown open her house to them, having given
them every opportunity of over-eating themselves on her[Pg 106]
excellent food, and being exhilarated by her admirable
wines, she washes her hands of them; and having enjoyed
her own champagne and venison, sits down to her Patience-table,
which is set out for her every night of her life, and
would be were Queen Victoria to honour her with a
visit.

Of the Beast Parties the Evans pair invariably form a
constituent part.

'I always ask the Evanses,' says milady good-naturedly.
'It is quite pretty to see the way in which he enjoys his
dinner; and she likes to wear her dyed gown, good woman,
and smuggle candied apricots into her pockets for those
ugly urchins of hers, and look out my friends in her "Peerage"
next day!'

So the Evanses are here, and several harmless rural
clergy; like them to the outer eye, though no doubt to
the inner as dissimilar as each island-like human soul is
from its neighbour. There are some large landowners
with their wives, and some very small lawyers and doctors
with theirs. There is a tallow-merchant, who to-day
grovels in hides and tallow, but to-morrow will probably—oh,
free and happy England!—soar to a seat in the Cabinet.
There is a Colonial Bishop imported by one neighbour, and
a fashionable buffoon introduced by another; and lastly,
there are Peggy and Prue.

Never before has Peggy set off to a Beast Party with
so light a heart. She knows how little chance of rational
or even irrational entertainment such a feast affords; and
yet, do what she will, she feels gay. Prue is gay too, extravagantly
gay, for did not Freddy stroll in half an hour
ago with a flower for her, and a request to her to wear her
green gown for his sake?

Before setting off Peggy bids her eleven birds good-night,
telling them that to-morrow they shall have a swinging
ladder in their large cage to remind them of the[Pg 107]
swinging tree-tops. Has not Talbot promised to make
them a ladder?

The girls have timed their arrival better than on a
former occasion. The room is already full when they
walk in with their breeze-freshened cheeks and their simple
clothes.

Margaret has not even her best dress on. She had
looked at it waveringly and hankeringly at dressing-time;
but a sort of superstition—an undefined feeling that she is
not going to meet any one for whom she has a right to
prank herself out, prevents her wearing it. But she cannot
help having her best face on. There is sunshiny
weather in her heart. Even her repulsion for Lady Betty
is weakened. Possibly she has been unjust towards her.
Certainly she is not the human octopus from whose grasp
no prey can escape alive, for which she took her. She
herself has the best reason for knowing that from this
octopus's arms prey can and does escape alive and well.
After all, she has condemned her upon mere loose hearsay
evidence. Henceforth she will trust only the evidence of
her own eyes and ears. At present her eyes tell her that
Betty is very highly rouged, and rather naked; and her
ears—thanks to the din of tongues—tell her nothing.

For a wonder, Lady Roupell is down in time, her gown
properly laced—usually, from excessive hurry, her maid
has to skip half the eyelet-holes—and with her ornaments
duly fastened on. She is following her usual rule, talking
to the person who amuses her most, and leaving all the
others to take care of themselves.

As soon as dinner is announced, and Freddy has walked
off with his allotted lady, she turns with an easy smile to
her company, and says:

'Will everybody take in somebody, please?'

At this command, so grateful and natural in a small and
intimate party, so extremely ill-suited to this large and[Pg 108]
miscellaneous crowd, there is a moment of hesitating and
consternation. The hearts of those who know that they
are never anybody's voluntary choice, but whom conventionality
generally provides with a respectable partner, sink
to the soles of their shoes. The young men hang back
from the girls, because they think that some one else may
have a better right to them. All fear to grasp at a
precedence not their due.

At length there is a movement. The tallow-merchant,
true to his principle of soaring, offers his arm to the wife
of the Lord-Lieutenant. The parsons and doctors begin
timidly to exchange wives. The Colonial Bishop casts his
landing-net over Prue. Margaret's is one of the few breasts
in the room in which the order for promiscuous choice has
excited a spark of pleasure. In the ordinary course of
things she is aware that it is improbable that Talbot would
be her portion. If it is a case of selection, the improbability
vanishes. She smiles slightly to herself as she recalls the
surly indignation with which she had discovered that he
was to be her fate on the last occasion of her dining here.
She is still smiling when he passes her by with Betty on
his arm. For a few seconds it seems as if the handsomest
girl in the room were to be left altogether overlooked and
unclaimed; and, in point of fact, she is one of the latest to
be paired. Usually such a blow to her vanity would have
disquieted her but little, as her pretensions are never high.
To-day she is shocked to find how much it galls her.

The ill-sorted party have taken their seats, precedence
gone, natural barriers knocked on the head, reciprocal
antipathies forced into close contact, in that topsy-turvy
Utopia of universal equality and amity which it is Lady
Roupell's principle to produce.

Margaret looks round the table to see how the principle
has worked. Mrs. Evans has been led in by the doctor, to
whom she is fully persuaded that she owes the death of[Pg 109]
the last Evans but one. The next largest squiress in the
parish to Lady Roupell is made sulky for the evening by
having had to accept the arm of her man of business.
Prue's Bishop has innocently planted her as far as the
length of the interminable table will allow from Freddy.
Betty and Talbot, though distant, are in sight. She can
see that they are sitting side by side in total silence. Is
this their mode of expressing their sorrow at their approaching
separation? Possibly; but, at all events, what a depth
of intimacy does such a total silence imply! Margaret's
own mate is the buffoon. She has often heard his name
as that of the pet of royalty; the darling of the fine ladies;
the crowning sparkle in each choicest social gathering. To
her, whether it be that her mental palate is out of taste,
he seems dull and coarse; his wit made up of ugly faces,
elderly double-entendres, flat indecencies.

'It is clear that I am not made for good company,' she
says to herself sadly and wearily. 'Jacob, and the birds,
and the fox—these are my society! They are the only
ones I am fit for.'

The long dinner ends at last, and the incongruous couples
part—in most cases with mutual relief. Neither Margaret
nor her merry man ever wish to set eyes upon each other
again. In the drawing-room natural affinities reassert
themselves: intimates gather into little groups. The
squiress, escaped from her presumptuous solicitor, makes
her plaint to her fellows. Mrs. Evans makes hers to
Peggy.

'Did you see how unlucky I was?' cries she. 'I assure
you it gave me quite a shudder to put my hand upon his
arm! I declare I look upon that man as as much the
murderer of my Natty as if he had stuck a knife into her.
I could hardly bear to speak to him. However, I managed
to secure some crackers for the children'—indicating a
tell-tale bulge in the direction of her pocket. 'Their last[Pg 110]
word to me before I came away was, "Mother, be sure you
bring us some crackers!"'

Then it is Prue's turn to make her lament, which she
begins with almost the same words as Mrs. Evans:

'Did you ever see anything like my ill-luck? I was the
farthest from him of anybody at the table. There were
eighteen between us. I counted. But did you notice how
he rushed to open the door? As I passed him he said to
me, "Thank you, Prue." That was because I had put my
green gown on. He is always so grateful for any little
thing that one does for him.'

She pauses rather suddenly, for Lady Betty has drawn
near.

'What a pretty frock!' says she, stopping before the
two girls. 'As green as grass, as jealousy, as green peas!
Come and talk to me, Miss Prue, and tell me what you
have all been doing to-day. You may have been up to any
amount of mischief for all I can tell. Do you know that
I have been writhing on a bed of pain from morning to
night? No? but I have. Are not you sorry for me?'

As she speaks she draws the childish figure down on
the sofa beside her.

Margaret walks away. She would like to take Prue
away too. There seems to her to be something unnatural
and sinister in an alliance, however temporary, between
these two, and from the distant corner to which she has
retired her eye often wanders uneasily back to them.

Presently her view is obscured. It is no use her looking
any longer. The sofa is shut out from her by a ring of
black coats that has clustered round it. Only now and
then, through the interstices, she catches the glint of one
of the numerous hornets, lizards, frogs, flashing in diamonds
upon Betty's breast. Bursts of laughter come from the
group, which Freddy and the buffoon have joined. In the
intervals of the other conversations buzzing around Peggy[Pg 111]
can hear Betty's high voice piercing. She cannot hear
what she says; but apparently it is always followed by
torrents of mirth, among which Prue's girl-tones are plainly
audible. Oh, what is Prue laughing at? If she could but
get her away!

As she so thinks, herself wedged in among a phalanx of
women, she sees a stir among the band she is watching.
It expands and moves, pursuing Betty, who has walked to
the piano. Evidently she has been persuaded to sing.

As soon as this intention has become manifest in the
room there is a polite hush in the talk. Wives look
menacingly at unmusical husbands. The Bishop, who is
fond of music, approaches the instrument. Betty has
seated herself leisurely, her audacious eyes wandering
round and taking in the prelate with a mischievous
twinkle.

'I am not quite sure that you will like it,' Peggy hears
her say. 'But, you know, I cannot help that—I did not
write it. It is supposed to be said by an affectionate
husband on the eve of his setting out for the wars.'

With this prelude she sets off—

'Oh! who will press that lily-white handWhen I am far away?Some other man!'

Two more lines in the nature of a chorus follow, but
they are so drowned by a roar of applause that Peggy can't
catch them. She can only conjecture their nature from
the look of impudent laughing challenge which the singer
throws at the men around her. Under cover of that roar
of applause the Bishop turns abruptly away.

The second verse follows—

'Oh! who will kiss those ruby lipsWhen I am far away?Some other man!'

Again the two drowned lines. Again the chord and the[Pg 112]
applause; but this time it is very evident that the approbation
is confined to the circle round the piano.

Betty has been well taught, and her enunciation is
exceedingly pure and distinct. Not a word of her charming
song is lost. She has reached the third verse—

'Oh! who will squeeze that little waistWhen I am far away?Some other man!'

Again that roar of admiring laughter from the men
round the piano—all the more marked from the displeased
silence of the rest of the room.

But is it only men who are encoring so ecstatically? Is
not that Prue who is joining her enraptured plaudits to
theirs?—Prue, with flushed face and flashing eyes, and
slight shoulders convulsed with merriment? If she could
but get her away! But that is out of the question; Prue
is in the inner circle, utterly beyond reach.

'Oh! who will pay those little bills?'

Peggy cannot stand it any longer; it makes her sick.
A gap in the ranks of ladies that had shut her in gives her
the wished-for opportunity to escape. She slips towards
an open French window giving on the terrace. Before
reaching it she has to pass Lady Roupell and her Patience.
As she does so she hears the old lady saying, in a voice of
tepid annoyance, to the man beside her:

'I wish that some one would stop her singing that indecent
song. She will not leave me a rag of character in
the county!'

CHAPTER XIV.

'Whilst she was hereMethought the beams of light that did appearWere shot from her; methought the moon gave noneBut what it had from her.'

Safely out on the terrace in the moonlight! Not, it is
true, a great wash of moonlight such as went billowing
over the earth when she paid her former night-visit to
milady's garden; but such small radiance as a lessening
crescent, now and then dimmed by over-flung cloud-kerchiefs,
can lend. The stars, indeed, seeing their lady faint
and fail, eke her out with their lesser lights. Peggy stands
drawing deep breaths, staring up at them with her head
thrown back, as they shine down upon her in their overwhelming,
overpowering distance, and purity and age. But
between her and their august and soothing silence comes
again that odious refrain:

'Some other man! .....'

She puts her fingers in her ears and runs, nor does she
stop until she has reached the close of the long, broad
gravel walk that keeps the house-front company from end
to end. Then she pauses and listens. No, she is not far
enough off even yet. Fainter, but still perfectly audible,
comes the vulgar ribaldry:

and then the storm of applause. Let her at all events
reach some spot where she will be unable to detect any
tone of Prue's in that insane mirth! But is there such a
spot? To her excited fancy it seems as if in the remotest
dell, the loneliest coppice of the park, she would still overhear
her Prue's little voice applauding that disgusting
pleasantry.

She walks quickly on, between flower-borders and shrubberies,
until she reaches a wrought-iron gate that leads into
the walled garden. She opens it and passes through, then
stands still once again to listen. She has succeeded at last.
Not an echo of Betty's high-pitched indecencies attains to
this quiet garden-close to offend her ears. There is no
noise less clean and harmless than that of the south wind
delicately wagging the heads of the slumberous flowers.

The garden, as its name implies, is hedged in from each
rude gust on three sides by stout walls, stone-coped and
balled. On the fourth, towards the sun-setting, it is guarded
only by a light decorated iron railing, now muffled in the
airy fluff of the traveller's joy, and embraced by the luxuriant
arms of the hop, the clematis, and the wandering
vine. Between their tendrils, between the branches of the
strong tea-rose and the Virginia creeper's autumn fires, one
catches friendly glimpses of the church tower and the park,
and the gentle deer. Inside, the garden is encompassed
by wide and crowded flower-borders, but the middle is
sacred to the green simplicity of the velvet grass.

Margaret draws a deep breath of relief, and begins to
walk slowly along. A row of tall, white gladioli, nearly as
high-statured as herself, looking ghostly fair in the starshine,
keep her company, lovely and virginal as May lilies;
and from the farther side of the garden comes an ineffable
waft of that violet smell which we used to connect only
with spring. As she paces to and fro the ugly din fades
out of her ears and the ireful red out of her cheeks. A[Pg 115]
sort of peace settles down upon her—only a sort of peace,
however! Her mind is still oppressed by the image of
Prue, and by a vague misgiving of coming trouble, coupled
with a sense, which she will not own to herself, of personal
disappointment, and of a mortified covert self-gratulation
upon not having worn her best gown, or in anywise tricked
herself out.

To one, however, whose hand is on the garden-latch,
as she so thinks, she looks tricked out enough, indeed, in
her own fairness; enough to make his heart sick with the
hopelessness of its longing as he goes towards her. After
all, she is not much surprised at his having followed her!
Possibly he may have a message of recall for her.

'Well!' she says, meeting him with a delicate moonlit
smile.

Low as the light is, it is light enough to show that there
is no answering smile on his face.

'So you escaped at last!' he says, with a sort of groan.
'I watched to see how long you could stand it.'

The shadow that the star-beams, and the violet breath,
and Heaven knows what other gentle influence, have chased
from her features, settles down on them again.

'I am never fond of comic songs,' she answers stiffly;
'and I do not think that that was a particularly favourable
specimen.'

He makes a gesture of disgust.

'Pah!' Then adds: 'I should have followed you before,
only that I wanted to get Prue away. I knew that
you would be glad if I could; but it was impossible!'

He has never spoken of her as 'Prue' before; but in
his present agitation—an agitation for which Peggy is at
a loss to account—he has obviously clean forgotten the
formal prefix.

She is too much touched by his thoughtfulness for her
to answer.[Pg 116]

'My chief motive for following you,' continues he,
speaking in an unusual and constrained voice, 'was that I
thought I might possibly not have another opportunity of
giving you this.'

As he speaks he puts a small parcel into her hands.

'It is only the ladder for the birds.'

She breaks into a laugh.

'They are in no such great hurry for it,' says she gaily;
'they could have waited until to-morrow.'

He sighs.

'I am afraid that they would have had to wait longer
than until to-morrow!'

'Well, I daresay that they might have made shift until
Wednesday,' returns she.

The entire unsuspiciousness of her tone makes his task
a tenfold harder one than it would otherwise have been.

'It is—it is better that you should take it yourself to
them,' he says, hesitating and floundering. 'I—I—might
be prevented after all from coming. There is a chance of
my—my—being obliged after all to go to-morrow!'

The star and moonlight are falling full on her face,
lifted and attentive: he can see it as plainly as at high
noonday. It seems to him that a tiny change passes over
it. But still she does not suspect the truth.

'What!' says she; 'has your chief telegraphed for
you? What a thing it is to be so indispensable!'

Shall he leave her in her error? Nothing would be
easier! Leave her in the belief that a legitimate summons
to honourable work has called him away; leave her with
a friendly face turned towards him, expecting and perhaps
lightly hoping his return. The temptation is strong, but
he conquers it.

'No,' he says, trying to speak carelessly; 'my chief is
innocent this time of breaking into my holiday. I expect
that he is enjoying his own too much; I am not going[Pg 117]
Londonwards; but—but—other reasons compel me to leave
to-morrow.'

How unutterably flat and naked it sounds! There is no
mistake now as to the change in her face—the change
that he has dreaded and yet known would come—the
hardening of eye and tightening of lip. Well, it is better
that it should come! And yet, do what he may, he
cannot leave her in the belief that, as he sees, has in one
moment stolen all the frank sweetness out of her eyes.

'I—I—am not going north, either,' he cries, in miserable,
eager stammering. 'I—I—do not know where I am going!'

'You are compelled to go, and yet you do not know
where you are going! is that a riddle?' asks she ironically.

Her tone jars horribly upon his strung and aching
nerves.

'Not much of a riddle,' he answers, with a bitter laugh.
'I do not know the exact road I am going to take; I only
know the direction—downhill.'

She fixes her eyes steadily upon his for a moment or
two, a ray of compassion stealing into them. So they
are to pass each other, like ships upon the sea! After all,
he has not been able to wrench himself out of the arms of
his octopus! A transient flash of self-derision crosses her
mind for having ever supposed it possible that he could,
coupled with an immense pity.

This is to be their last speech together; for some
instinct tells her that he will not return. Let it not,
then, be bitter speech! Poor fellow! There are aloes
enough, God wot, in the cup he has brewed for himself!

'Well!' she says, smiling kindly, albeit very sadly, at
him, 'whether you go uphill or downhill, the birds and I
must always have a good word for you. I do not know
what we should have done without you; you have been so
kind to us all—to me and my Prue, and my fox and my
birds!'[Pg 118]

He ought to make some acknowledgment of this farewell
civility of hers; but to 'ought' and to do have, since
the world was, never been one and the same thing. He
receives it in a suffocated silence.

'And I was so rude to you at first,' pursues she, lightly
brushing, as she speaks, her own lips with a bit of mignonette
she has gathered from the odorous bed at her feet,
perhaps to hide the slight tremble of which she cannot but
be conscious in them—'so angry at being sent in to dinner
with you! but, then'—with another friendly starlit smile—'you
must remember that I did not know how well you
could mow!'

He is still silent, his throat choked with words he dare
not utter. Oh, if she would only stop! But she goes on
in all innocence:

'You never took your bunch of lavender after all to-day.
I thought of bringing it up for you to-night, but then I
remembered that I should see you to-morrow, so I did
not; I wish I had now.'

Cannot he find even one word? one word of prayer to
her in mercy to be silent? Not one!

'Are you going by an early train?' continues she; 'because,
if not, I might send up Alfred with it in the morning,
if you really cared to have it.'

Perhaps it is that last most unnecessary clause that
loosens the string of his tied tongue.

'Do not!' he says almost rudely; 'I hope I shall never
smell the scent of lavender again!'

For a moment she looks at him, astonished at his
discourtesy; but probably his face explains it, for her eyes
drop. When next she speaks it is in a rather colder key.

'At all events I must send you back your books; you
left some books with us to-day, if you remember.'

If he remember the Keats from which he was to have
read aloud to her to-morrow, sitting beside her under the[Pg 119]
Judas-tree, with her little finches calling to her from the
house, with Mink crouched on her white skirt, and the
parrot waddling over the sward, with his toes turned in, to
have his head scratched by her! If he remember! She
must be the very 'belle dame sans merci' of whom John
Keats spake, to ask him that! May not he at least beg
her to keep his Keats to remember him by—laying here
and there among the leaves a sprig of the lavender they
together plucked? No! No! No! Out of her life he
and his Keats must depart, as she and her lavender out of
his. Who, in his place, will read her 'La Belle Dame sans
merci'? As if in devilish mockery of the jealous anguish
of this question comes Betty's disgusting refrain darting
across his mind:

'Some other man! ..... .....'

He grinds his teeth. It is some minutes before he can
regain sufficient command over himself to answer with a
tolerable appearance of composure:

'You are right; I will send for them!'

A little sighing gust has risen; sighing for him perhaps,
he thinks, with a flash of imaginative self-pity, as he watches
its soft antics among the lily-like flowers, and its light
ruffling of Peggy's gown. It has mistaken her for one of
the flowers! What foolish fancies are careering through
his hot brain! There can be none in hers, or how could she
be holding out such a cool hand and lifting such a suave
calm look to his?

'I must be going,' she says, speaking in a rather lower
voice than is her wont; 'good-bye! Since'—a wavering
smile breaking tremulously over her face—'since you are
so determined to go downhill, I suppose I dare not say that
I hope our roads will ever meet again!'[Pg 120]

Her hand slides out of his unreturning clasp. He feels
that if he keep that soft prisoner for one instant, he must
keep it through eternity.

'Good-bye!' he says.

He would like to bid God bless her; but he can no
more do it than Macbeth could say 'Amen.' What right
has he to bid God bless her? Will God be more likely to
send her a benison for his unworthy asking? So he lets
her go unblessed.

CHAPTER XV

The Beast Party is over. It has not differed materially
from its predecessors, though it may perhaps glory in the
bad pre-eminence of having left even more ill-feeling and
mortification in its wake than did they.

The little Evanses, indeed, bless its memory, gobbling the
bonbons and strutting about the Vicarage garden in the
masks and fools' caps that they have extracted out of its
crackers. And Lady Roupell, too, is perfectly satisfied with
it. Her guests have come, have eaten and drunk, have
gone away again, and she need not trouble her head about
them for another six months. To-day she gets rid of all
her friends except the Harborough children, and is left at
liberty to waddle about in her frieze coat, and with her
spud in her hand, in peace—a peace which, at the worst of
times, she never allows to be very seriously infringed. But
there are gradations of age and shabbiness in her frieze
coats, and to-day she may don the oldest.

The peace of the Manor, like its gaieties, is apt to be
reflected in the Cottage: an exodus from the one is virtually
an exodus from the other; and, as such, is apt to be rejoiced
over by Margaret as the signal for Prue to begin to eat her
dinner better, sleep sounder, and engage in some other
occupation than running to the end of the garden to see
whether there is a sign of any messenger coming from the
Manor. She is at her post of predilection this morning—the
end of the garden that overhangs the highway—that[Pg 122]
highway along which all arrivers at and departers from the
Big House must needs travel. She is looking eagerly down
the road.

'Prue!' cries her sister from under the Judas-tree, where
she is sitting, for a wonder, unoccupied.

'Yes,' replies Prue, but without offering to stir from her
post of observation.

'Come here. I want to talk to you.'

'In a minute—directly—by and by.'

A few moments pass.

'Prue?'

'Yes.'

'What are you looking at? What are you waiting for?'

'I am waiting for the Harboroughs to pass. I want to
kiss my hand to Lady Betty as she goes by; she asked me
to.'

Margaret makes a gesture of annoyance, and irritably
upsets Mink, who has just curled himself upon her skirt;
but she offers no remonstrance, and it is a quarter of an hour
before—the brougham with its Harboroughs, late as usual,
and galloping to catch the train, having whirled past and
been watched till quite out of sight—Prue saunters up
radiant.

'She kissed her hand to me all the way up the hill!'
says she, beaming with pleasure at the recollection. 'I
threw her a little bunch of jessamine just as the carriage
went by. She put her head out in a second, and caught
it in her teeth!' Was not it clever of her? She is so
clever!'

'Why should she kiss her hand to you? Why should
you throw her jessamine?' asks Peggy gloomily.

'Why should not I?' returns the other warmly. 'I am
sure she has been kind enough to me, if you only knew!'

'You were not so fond of her last week,' says Margaret,
lifting a pair of very troubled eyes to her sister's face.[Pg 123]
'Have you already forgotten the three days running that
she robbed you of your ride?'

'I cannot think how I could have been so silly!' returns
Prue, with a rather forced laugh. 'Of course, it was a
mere accident. He says he wonders how I could have been
so silly; he was dreadfully hurt about it. He says he looks
upon her quite as an elder sister.'

'An elder sister!' echoes Peggy, breaking into a short
angry laugh. 'The same sort of elder sister, I think, as
the nursery-maid is to the Life Guardsman!'

'I cannot think how you can be so censorious!' retorts
Prue, reddening. 'He says it is your one weakness. He
admires your character more than that of any one he knows—he
says it is—it is—laid upon such large lines; but that
he has often been hurt by the harshness of your judgments
of other people.'

'Indeed!' says Peggy, with a sort of snort. 'But I
daresay that Lady Betty bandages up his wounds.'

'You must have noticed how kind she was to me last
night,' continues Prue, thinking it wiser to appear not to
have heard this last thrust. 'Of course, every one was
longing to talk to her, but she quite singled me out—me,
of all people! Oh, if you only knew!'

'If I only knew what?' inquires Margaret, struck by
the recurrence of this phrase, to which on its first utterance
she had paid little heed, as being the vague expression of
Prue's girlish enthusiasm.

Prue hesitates a moment.

'If—if—you only knew the delightful plan she has made!'

'What plan?' shortly and sternly.

'She—she—I cannot think why she did it; it must
have been the purest kind-heartedness—she asked me to
go and stay with her.'

The colour has mounted brave and bright from
Margaret's cheeks to her brow.[Pg 124]

'She asked you to stay with her?' repeats she, with
slow incisiveness; 'she had the impudence to ask you to
stay with her!'

Prue gives a start that is almost a bound.

'The impudence?'

'The woman who had the effrontery to sing that song
last night,' pursues Peggy, her voice gathering indignation
as it goes along, 'has now the impudence to invite a
respectable girl like you to stay with her! Oh, Prue!' her
tone changing suddenly to one of eager, tender pain, 'just
think what I felt last night when I saw you standing
among all those men in fits of laughter at her stupid
indecencies! Oh! how could you laugh? What was
there to laugh at?'

Prue has begun to whimper.

'They all laughed. I—I—laughed be—be—cause they
laughed!'

'And now you want to go and stay with her!' says
Margaret, touched and yet annoyed by her sister's easy
tears, and letting her long arms fall to her side with a
dispirited gesture, as if life were growing too hard for her.

'I am sure it would be no great wonder if I did,' says
Prue, still snivelling. 'I, who never go anywhere. She—Lady
Betty I mean—could not believe it when I told
her I had only been to London twice in my life; and He
says that the Harboroughs' is the pleasantest house in
England!'

'What does He say?' inquires a soft, gay voice, coming
up behind them. 'Why, Prue, what is this? Why are
the waterworks turned on? It is early in the day for the
fountains to begin playing!' and Freddy Ducane—the
flower-like Freddy—with his charming complexion, his
laughing eyes, and his beautifully-fitting clothes, stands
between the agitated girls.

He has taken Prue's hands, both the one that contains[Pg 125]
the small damp ball of her pocket-handkerchief and the
other. But she snatches them away and runs off.

'You seem to have been having rather a quick thing,'
says the young man, bringing back his eyes from the flying
to the stationary figure.

The latter has risen.

'Did you know of this invitation?' asks she abruptly,
without any attempt at a preliminary salutation.

'I do not much like that dagger-and-bowl way of being
asked questions,' returns Freddy, sinking pleasantly into
the chair Margaret has just quitted. 'What invitation?'

'You know perfectly well what invitation!' retorts she,
her breast beginning to heave and her nostril to quiver,
while her pendent right hand unconsciously clenches itself.

Freddy has thrown back his curly head, and is regarding
her luxuriously from under his tilted hat, and between his
half-closed lids.

'I wish you would stay exactly as you are for just two
minutes,' he says rapturously; 'I never saw you look
better in my life! What a pose! And you fell into it so
naturally, too! I declare, Peg, though we have our little
differences, there is no one that at heart appreciates you
half as much as I do!'

'I suppose that you suggested it?' says Margaret
sternly, passing by with the most absolute silent contempt
her companion's gallantries, and abandoning in the twinkling
of an eye the admired posture which she had been
invited to retain.

'I suggested it!' repeats Freddy, lifting his brows.
'Knowing my Peggy as I do, should I have been likely to
call the chimney-pots down about my own head?'

'But you knew of it? You had heard of it?'

'I daresay I did. I hear a great many things that I
do not pay much attention to.'

'And you think that Lady Betty Harborough would be[Pg 126]
a desirable friend for Prue?' says Peggy in bitter interrogation,
and unintentionally falling back into her
Medea attitude, a fact of which she becomes aware only by
perceiving Freddy's hand covertly stealing to his pocket in
search of a pencil and notebook to sketch her.

At the sight her exasperation culminates. She snatches
the pencil out of his hand and throws it away.

'Cannot you be serious for one moment?' she asks
passionately. 'If you knew how sick I am of your eternal
froth and flummery!'

'Well, then, I am serious,' returns he, putting his hands
in his pockets, and growing grave; 'and if you ask my
opinion, I tell you,' with an air as if taking high moral
ground, 'that I do not think we have any of us any
business to say, "Stand by! I am holier than thou!" It
has always been your besetting sin, Peggy, to say, "Stand
by! I am holier than thou!"'

'Has it?' very drily.

'Now it is a sort of thing that I never can say' (warming
with his theme). 'I do not take any special credit to
myself, but I simply cannot. I say, "Tout savoir c'est
tout pardonner!"'

'Indeed!'

'And so I naturally cannot see'—growing rather galled
against his will by the excessive curtness of his companion's
rejoinders—'that you have any right to turn your back
upon poor Betty! Poor soul! what chance has she if we
all turn our backs upon her?'

'And so Prue is to stay with Lady Betty to bolster up
her decayed reputation?' cries Peggy, breaking into an
ireful laugh. 'I never heard of a more feasible plan!'

'I think we ought all to stand shoulder to shoulder in
the battle of life!' says Freddy loftily, growing rather
red.

'So that was what Prue was crying about?' says
Freddy, with a quiet air of reflection. 'Poor Prue! if
you have been addressing her with the same air of amenity
that you have me, it does not surprise me. I sometimes
wonder,' looking at her with an air of candid and temperate
speculation, 'how you, who are so genuinely good at
bottom, can have the heart to make that child cry in the
way you do!'

'I did not mean to make her cry,' replies poor Peggy
remorsefully. 'I hate to make her cry!'

'And yet you manage to do it pretty often, dear,' rejoins
Freddy sweetly. 'Now, you know, to me it seems,' with
a slight quiver in his voice, 'as if no handling could be too
tender for her!'

Peggy gives an impatient groan. At his words, before
her mind's eye rises the figure of Prue waiting ready dressed
in her riding-habit day after day—watching, listening,
running to the garden-end, and crawling dispiritedly back
again; the face of Prue robbed of its roses, clipped of its
roundness, drawn and oldened before its time by Freddy's
'tender handling.' A bitter speech rises to her lips; but
she swallows it back. Of what use? Can the Ethiopian
change his skin, or the leopard his spots?

Another pause, while Margaret looks blankly across the
garden, and Freddy inhales the smell of the mignonette,
and scratches Mink's little smirking gray head. At length:

'So you do not mean to let her go?' says the young
man interrogatively.

'I think not,' replies Peggy witheringly. 'If I want
her taught ribald songs I can send her to the alehouse in
the village, and I do not know any other end that would
be served by her going there.'[Pg 128]

Freddy winces a little.

'I daresay you are right,' he rejoins blandly. 'I always
say that there is no one whose judgment I would sooner
take than yours; and, in point of fact, I am not very keen
about the plan myself; it was only poor Prue's being so
eager about it that made me advocate it. You see,' with a
charming smile, 'I am not like you, Peggy. When persons
come to me brimming over with pleasure in a project, I
have not the strength of mind instantly to empty a jug of
cold water all over them! I wish I had! it would,' sighing
pensively, 'make life infinitely less difficult!'

'You are going to Harborough yourself, I suppose?'
asks Peggy brusquely, brushing away like cobwebs her
companion's compliments and aspirations.

He shrugs his shoulders.

'How can I tell? Do I ever know where I may drift
to? I may wake up there some fine morning. It is not a
bad berth, and,' with a return to the high moral tone, 'if
one can help a person ever so little, I think that one has
no right to turn one's back upon her!'

'Of course not!' ironically.

'And I have always told you,' with an air of candid
admission, 'that I am fond of Betty!'

'I know,' returns Peggy, with a somewhat sarcastic
demureness—'I have heard; you look upon her quite as
an elder sister; it is a charming relationship!'

Freddy reddens, but instantly recovering himself:

'I am not so sure about that! I must consult Prue!'
cries he, going off with a laugh, and with the last word.

CHAPTER XVI

She remains behind without a laugh. She is not, however,
left long to her own reflections, for scarcely is young
Ducane out of sight before Prue reappears. Her eyes are
dried, and her cheeks look hot and bright.

'Well?' she says, in a rather hard voice, coming and
standing before her sister.

'Well, dear!' returns Peggy, taking one of her hands
and gently stroking it.

'Has he been talking to you about it?' asks the young
girl, with a quick short breathing.

'I have been talking to him about it,' returns Margaret
gravely, 'if that is the same thing.'

'And you have told him that I—I—am not to go?'

'Yes.'

Prue has pulled her hand violently away, which for a
few moments is her only rejoinder; then:

'I hope,' she says in a faltering voice, 'that you told
him as—as gently as you could. You are so often hard
upon him; it must have been such a—such a bitter
disappointment!'

'Was it?' says Peggy sadly; 'I think not! Did you
hear him laughing as he went away? You need not make
yourself unhappy on that score; he told me he had never
been very eager for the plan!'

'He said so!' cries Prue, with almost a scream, while a
deluge of carnation pours over her face. 'Oh, Peggy! you[Pg 130]
must be inventing. He could not have said that! I think—without
intending it of course—you often misrepresent
him! Oh, he could not have said it! Why, only last
night, as we were walking home in the moonlight, he said
that to have me there under those chestnuts—I believe
that the Harboroughs have some very fine old Spanish
chestnuts in their park—would be the realisation of a
poet's dream.'

Peggy groans.

'If he did say it,' continues Prue, in great agitation, 'it
was to please you. He saw how set against the plan you
were, and he has such beautiful manners—such a lovely
nature that he cannot bear saying anything that goes
against the person he is talking to.'

'Perhaps you are right in your view of his character,'
says Peggy quietly, but with a tightening of the lines about
her mouth that tells of acute pain; 'in fact he told me
that the only reason of his having ever advocated the
project was that you were so keen about it.'

If Peggy imagines that the drastic medicine conveyed
in this speech will have a healing effect upon her sister's
sick nature, she soon sees that she is mistaken.

'And is it any wonder if I am keen about it?' asks she,
trembling with excitement. 'I who have never had any
pleasure in all my life!'

'Never any pleasure in all your life!' repeats Peggy,
in a tone of sharp suffering. 'Oh, Prue! and I thought
we had been so happy together! I thought we had not
wanted anything but each other!'

Prue looks rather ashamed.

'Oh! of course we have been happy enough,' returns
she; 'just jogging along from day to day—every day the
same. But that—that,' her agitation gathering volume
again, 'that is not pleasure.'

'Pleasure!' repeats Margaret, with reflective bitterness;[Pg 131]
'what is pleasure? I suppose that the party last night was
pleasure. I think, Prue, that pleasure is an animal that
mostly carries a sting in its tail.'

'I—I should not be among strangers either,' urges Prue,
with that piteous crimson still raging in her cheeks; 'he
would be there.'

'And he would be such an efficient chaperon, would
not he?' returns Peggy, unable to help a melancholy smile.
'But from what he said to me, even his going seems problematical.'

'Oh no, it is not!' cries Prue hurriedly. 'There is no
doubt about that; the very day is fixed. I—I,' faltering,
'was invited for the same one, too.'

Again Margaret gives vent to an impatient groan at this
fresh proof of Freddy's unveracity, but she says nothing.

'Is it quite sure that I am not to go?' asks Prue,
throwing herself upon her knees at her sister's feet, and
looking up with her whole fevered soul blazing in her eyes.
'I do not feel as if I had ever wished for anything in my
whole life before.'

Peggy turns away her head.

'I shall have to begin to live on my own account some
time!' continues Prue, her words tumbling one over
another in her passionate beseeching. 'I cannot always
be in leading-strings! Why may not I begin now?'

'Are you going to kill me, then?' asks Margaret, with
a painful laugh. 'Am I to die to be out of your way? I
am afraid, for your sake, that I do not see much chance
of it.'

'I have never in my whole life stayed in the same
house with him,' pursues Prue, too passionately bent upon
her own aim to be even aware of her sister's sufferings.
'He says himself that our meetings are so scrappy and
patchy that he sometimes thinks they are more tantalising
than none.'[Pg 132]

'And whose fault is it, pray, if they are scrappy and
patchy?' cries Peggy, bursting out into a gust of irrepressible
indignation. 'Who hinders him from coming here at
sunrise and staying till sunset?'

'You never did him justice,' returns Prue irritably.
'You never see how sensitive he is; he says he thinks that
every one's privacy is so sacred, that he has a horror of intruding
upon it. Ah! you will never understand him!
He says himself that his is such a complex nature, he fears
you never will.'

'I fear so too!' replies Peggy sadly.

There is a short silence.

'I—I—would behave as nicely as I could,' says poor
Prue, beginning again her faltering beseechments. 'I—I—would
not do anything that I was not quite sure that you
would like.'

The tears have stolen again into her great blue eyes,
and across Margaret's mind darts, in a painful flash, the
recollection of Freddy's late reproach to her, for the frequency
with which she makes his Prue cry.

'I am sure you would not!' cries the elder sister, in a
pained voice, taking the little eager face, and framing it in
both her compassionate hands. 'Oh, Prue, it is not you
that I doubt!'

'But indeed you are not just to her!' returns the young
girl, eagerly seizing her sister's wrists, and pressing them
with a violence of which she herself is not aware, in her
own hot, dry clasp. 'You should see her at home! He
says that you should see her at home; that every one should
see her at home; that no one knows what she is at home,
and that she has a heart of gold—oh, such a good heart!'

'They always have good hearts!' rejoins Margaret,
with a sad irony. 'These sort of women always have
good hearts.'

'And every one goes there,' urges Prue, panting and[Pg 133]
speaking scarcely above a whisper. 'Last year the Prince
of Morocco was there.'

'H'm! Nice customs curtsey to great kings!'

'And the Bishop.'

'What Bishop?'

'Oh, I do not quite know. A Bishop; and when he
went away he thanked Lady Betty for the most delightful
three days he had ever spent.'

'H'm!'

'He thought it so beautiful of him; he said it showed
so large a charity.'

'So it did.'

'And if a Bishop visits her' (redoubling her urgencies,
as she fancies she detects a slight tone of relenting in her
sister's voice)——

'Do you think that she sang to him?' interrupts
Margaret scathingly. 'Oh, Prue!' (as the vision of Betty
with her song, her naked shoulders, bismuthed eyes, and
dubious jests, rises in all its horrible vividness between
her and the poor, simple face, lifted in such passionate
begging to hers), 'I cannot; it is no use to go on asking
me. Oh, do not ask me any more; it only makes us both
miserable! I tell you' (with rising excitement) 'I—I had
rather push you over that wall' (pointing to the one at
the garden-end, which drops sharply to the road), 'or throw
you into that pool' (indicating a distant silver glint), 'than
let you go to her!'

There is such an impassioned decision in both eyes and
words that Prue's hopes die. She rises from her knees,
and stands quite still on the sward opposite her sister.
Her colour has turned from vivid red to paper-white, with
that rapidity peculiar to people in weak health. In a
moment she has grown to look ten years older.

'I suppose,' she says in a low but very distinct key,
'that it is John Talbot who has made you hate her so!'[Pg 134]
Then she turns on her heel and walks slowly towards the
house.

As long as she is in sight Peggy stares after her wide-eyed,
and as if stunned; then she covers her face with
both hands and bursts into a passion of tears, in comparison
with which Prue's small weepings are as a summer shower
to a lashing winter storm. Can it be that there is any
truth in her sister's words?

A few days pass, and to a superficial look the Big House
and the Little House wear precisely the same aspect as
they did before the invasion of the former by its last batch
of guests. It is only to a more careful eye that the presence
of the little Harboroughs in the Manor nurseries, to
which they are chiefly confined—milady having no great
passion for the society of other people's children—is revealed;
and it would require a still nicer observation to
detect the change in the Little Red House. There is no
longer any question there of the Harborough invitation.
It has been declined, though in what terms the refusal was
couched Peggy is ignorant. At all events the letter to
Lady Betty has gone. Freddy has gone too. It had been
understood, or Margaret imagined that it had been understood,
that he, at least, was to have remained; that he had,
in fact, been counting the hours until the departure of
importunate strangers should leave him free to show the
real bent of his inclinations.

However that may be, he has gone, having deferred his
going no later than the day but one after that which saw
the Harboroughs' exodus. He leaves behind him a misty
impression of having reluctantly obeyed some call of duty—some
summons of exalted friendship. It is a duty, a
task that involves the taking with him of two guns, a
cricket-bag, and some fishing-rods.

The Manor is therefore tenanted only by its one old[Pg 135]
woman, and the Red House by its two young ones. This
is a condition of things that has existed very often before
without any of the three looking upon herself as an object
of pity in consequence of it.

Milady is far, indeed, from thinking herself an object of
pity now. But the other two? Prue has made no further
effort to alter her sister's decision. She has beset her with
no more of those tears and entreaties that Margaret had
found so sorely trying, but she has exchanged them for a
mood which makes Peggy ask herself hourly whether she
does not wish them back. A heavy blanket of silence
seems to have fallen upon the cheerful Little House, and
upon the garden, still splendid in colour and odour, in its
daintily tended smallness. The parrot appears to have
taken a vow of silence, in expiation of all the irrelevant
and loose remarks of his earlier years; a vow of silence
which the greenfinch and the linnet have servilely imitated.
Even Mink barks less than usual at the passing carts; and
though his bark, as a bark, is below contempt for its shrill
thinness, Peggy would be glad to hear even it in the
absence of more musical sounds.

Prominent among those more musical sounds used to be
Prue's singing, and humming, and lilting, as she ran about
the house, and jumped about the garden with Mink and
the cat. Prue never now either sings or runs. She is not
often seen in the garden: dividing her time between the
two solitudes of her own room and of long and lonely
walks. If spoken to, she answers briefly and gravely; if
her sister asks her to kiss her, she presents a cold cheek;
but she volunteers neither speech nor caress. She eats
next to nothing, and daily falls away in flesh and colour.

By the close of the week Peggy is at her wits' end.
She has spent hours in the hot kitchen trying to concoct
some dainty that may titillate that sickly palate. In vain.
To her anxious apostrophes, 'Oh, Prue! you used to like[Pg 136]
my jelly!' 'Oh, Prue! cannot you fancy this cream? I
made it myself!' there is never but the one answer, the
pushed-away plate, and the 'Thank you, I am not hungry!'

One morning, when the almost ostentatiously neglected
breakfast, and the hollow cheeks that seem to have grown
even hollower since over-night, have made Peggy well-nigh
desperate, she puts on her hat and runs up to the Manor.
She must hold converse with some human creature or
creatures upon the subject that occupies so large and
painful a share of her thoughts. Perhaps to other and
impartial eyes Prue may not appear so failing as to her
over-anxious ones. She reaches the Big House just as
milady takes her seat at the luncheon-table. Miss and
Master Harborough, who have been given swords by some
injudicious admirer, have been rushing bellowing downstairs,
brandishing them in pursuit of the footmen. Nor has the
eloquence of the latter at all availed to induce Franky to
relinquish his, even when he is hoisted into his high chair
and invested with his dinner-napkin. He still wields it,
announcing a doughty intention of cutting his roast-beef
with it.

'You will do nothing of the kind!' replies milady, who,
on principle, always addresses children in the same tone
and words as she would grown-up people; 'it would be
preposterous; no one ever cuts beef with a sword. You
would be put into Bedlam if you did.'

And Lily, whose clamour has been far in excess of her
brother's, chimes in with pharisaic officiousness, 'Nonsense,
Franky! do not be naughty! You must remember that
we are not at home!'

'Bedlam!' repeats Franky, giving up his weapon
peaceably, and pleased at the sound. 'Where is Bedlam?
Is that where mammy has gone?'

At the sound of the French words a look of acute
baffled misery has come into Lily's face, which, later on,
deepens on her being assured that she and her brother have
sufficiently feasted, and may efface themselves. Franky
gallops off joyfully with his sword; and his sister follows
reluctantly with hers. As soon as they are really out of
earshot—Peggy has learnt by experience the length of
Lily's ears—she answers the question that had been put
to her by another.

'Do you think that I ought to have let her go?'

Milady shrugs her shoulders.

'Everybody goes there. Lady Clanranald, who is the[Pg 138]
most straitlaced woman in London, takes her girls there;
one must march with one's age.'

The colour has deepened in Margaret's face.

'Then you think that I ought to have let her go?'

Lady Roupell is peeling a peach. She looks up from it
for an instant, with a careless little shrug.

'I daresay that she would have amused herself. If she
likes bear-fighting, and apple-pie beds, and practical jokes,
I am sure that she would.'

'And songs?' adds Peggy, with a curling lip; 'you
must not forget them.'

'Pooh!' says milady cynically; 'Prue has no ear, she
would not pick them up; and, after all, Betty's bark is
worse than her bite.'

'Is it?' very doubtfully.

'Why do not you go too, and look after her?' asks the
elder woman, lifting her shrewd eyes from the peach, off
whose naked satin she has just whipped its rosy blanket, to
her companion's troubled face.

'I am not invited.'

'And you would not go if you were—eh?'

'I would sooner go than let her go by herself,' replies
poor Peggy with a groan.

'She is looking very ill,' says Lady Roupell, not unkindly.
'What have you done to her? I suppose that Freddy has
been teasing her!'

'I suppose so,' dejectedly.

'I wish that he would leave her alone,' rejoins milady,
with irritation. 'I have tried once or twice to broach the
subject to him, but he always takes such high ground that
I never know where to have him.'

'I wish you would send him away somewhere!' cries
Peggy passionately. 'Could not you send him on a tour
round the world?'

'He would not go; he would tell me that though there
is nothing in the world he should enjoy so much, it is his
obvious duty to stay by my side, and guide my tottering
footsteps to the grave.'

She laughs robustly, and Peggy joins dismally. There
is a pause.

'She does look very ill,' says the younger woman, in a
voice of poignant anxiety; 'and long ago our doctor told
us that she was not to be thwarted in anything. Oh,
milady,' with an outburst of appeal for help and sympathy,
'do you think I am killing her? What am I to do? oh,
do advise me!'

'Let her go!' replies the elder woman half-impatiently,
yet not ill-naturedly either. 'She will fret herself to
fiddlestrings if you do not; and you will have a long
doctor's bill to pay. I daresay she will not come to much
harm. I will tell Lady Clanranald to have an eye upon
her; and if she fall ill, I can promise you that nobody will
poultice and bolus her more thoroughly than Betty would;
she loves physicking people.'

Even this last assurance fails very much to exhilarate
Margaret. She draws on her gloves slowly, takes leave
sadly, and walks heavily away. She does not go directly
home, but fetches a compass through the lanes, on whose
high hedges the passing harvest-waggons have left their
ripe tribute of reft ears; over a bit of waste land, barrenly
beautiful with thistles, some in full purple flush, some
giving their soft down to the fresh wind. Singing to
them, sitting on a mountain-ash tree, is a sleek robin.
Peggy stands still mechanically to listen to him; but his
contented music knocks in vain at her heart's door. There
is no one to let it in. In vain, too, the reaped earth and
the pretty white clouds, voyaging northwards under the
south wind's friendly puffs, and the thistle's imperial stain
ask entrance to her eye. Whether standing or walking,[Pg 140]
whether abstractedly looking or deafly listening, there is
but one thought in her mind; one question perpetually
asking itself, 'Is it really and solely for Prue's good that I
have prevented her going?' Neither the thistles nor the
redbreast supply her with any answer. The only one that
she gets comes ringing and stinging back in Prue's own
words: 'I suppose it is John Talbot who has made you
hate her so.' 'Can there be any truth in them?' she asks
again, as she had asked with tears when they were first
spoken.

Her aimless walk has brought her, when the afternoon
is already advanced, to the gate of the Vicarage. It is
open, swinging to and fro, with a bunch of ugly little
Evanses clustered upon its bars. This slight fact of its
being open just makes the scale dip towards entering. She
enters. Mrs. Evans is in the nursery, as the nurse is taking
her holiday. She is sitting with a newish baby in a cradle
at her side, and an oldish one alternately voyaging on its
stomach across the scoured boards, and forcing its sketchy
nose between the uprights of the tall nursery fender. A
basket of unmended stockings balances the cradle on Mrs.
Evans's other side, and an open Peerage lies upon her lap.

'Why, you are quite a stranger!' she says. 'I have
not seen you since the party at the Manor. I was just
looking out some of the people who were there. I have
not had a moment to spare since; and you know I like to
find out who is who.'

Peggy sits down, and the old baby props itself against
the leg of a chair to stare at her.

'How is Prue?' asks Mrs. Evans, discarding the
Peerage. 'Mr. Evans met her yesterday on Wanborough
Common, five miles away from home. Do you think it
is wise to let her take such long walks?'

'I did not know that she had been so far,' answers
Peggy dispiritedly.[Pg 141]

'I do not like her looks,' continues the other, consulting
Peggy's face with a placid eye, full of that comfortable and
easy-sitting compassion with which our neighbours' anxieties
are apt to inspire us. 'Do you ever give her cod-liver oil?'

'She has been taking it for the last two months.'

'Or malt? Malt is an excellent thing; the extract, you
know—half a glass taken after meals. It did wonders for
Billy. No one would have known him for the same boy.'

'I have tried that too.'

'I expect that what she wants is change of air,' says
Mrs. Evans, shaking her head as she thrusts her hand into
the foot of a stocking, running an experienced eye over the
area of its injuries. 'Could not you manage to give her a
little?'

For an instant Margaret is silent; then she says abruptly:

'Lady Betty Harborough has invited her to pay her a
visit.'

'Lady Betty Harborough!' cries Mrs. Evans, dropping
stocking and darning-needle. 'Dear me! what luck some
people have! And you, too? No? I wish she had asked
you too.' It is the measure of how low Peggy has fallen
that she goes nigh to echoing this wish. 'Well, she must
be a very kind-hearted woman,' pursues Mrs. Evans, resuming
her darning-needle, 'as well as a very pretty one. And
what a charming voice she has! That was a horrid song
she sang; I did not hear the words very clearly myself.
Mr. Evans says it was just as well that I did not; but how
well she sang it! What spirit! When does Prue go?'

'I—I—am not sure that she is going at all.'

'I would not put it off longer than I could help, if I
were you,' says Mrs. Evans. 'Do not you think that she
has fallen away a good deal of late? And such an opportunity
may not come again in a hurry. Dear me!' with a
sigh and a glance towards the two babies and the stocking-basket,
'some people are in luck!'[Pg 142]

It is evident that Margaret is not destined to draw much
consolation from her visits to-day. At the gate Mr. Evans
is waiting to greet her, having routed that numerous detachment
of his offspring which was ornamenting it on Peggy's
arrival. There are day's on which Mr. Evans's children
appear to him intolerably ugly, and his lot unbearably
sordid. On such days he lies under a tree, reading Morris's
Earthly Paradise, and his family give him a wide berth.

'How is Miss Prue?' he asks, holding the gate open for
her to pass through. 'I met her yesterday on Wanborough
Common, looking like a——'

'Are you quite happy about her?' inquires he, not perceiving
his companion's shrinking from the subject, glad to
escape for a few moments from the contemplation of his
own unpicturesque ills to the more poetic ones of other
people, and walking a few paces down the road at her side.
'Had not you better take care that she does not slip through
your fingers?'

CHAPTER XVII

A fortnight later, and Peggy is alone. Prue has gone
after all—gone to that paradise, in yearning for which she
seemed to be stooping towards the grave; she has gone to
empty jugs of water over stairs on Guardsmen's heads, to
put crackers into the coat-tail pockets of Secretaries of
Legation, and set booby-traps for Members of Parliament.
No wonder that even before entering upon these glories
their mere prospect had restored her to more than her
pristine vigour. She has gone, with Peggy's one string of
pearls in her trinket-case; with Peggy's best gown, contracted
and modified to her smaller shape, in her trunk.
She has gone, nodding her head, waving her hand, and
blowing kisses, altogether restored apparently to the blithe
Prueship of earlier days. But at what price?

Peggy's repugnance to the plan has been in no degree
diminished by the fact of her having consented to it. She
has consented to it, driven partly by a suspicion that her
opposition has been half-due to no solicitude for her sister's
welfare, but to a resentment and an ache of her own;
driven much more, though, by Mr. Evans's few light words,
'Take care that she does not slip through your fingers!'
They pursue her by day and by night. 'Slip through her
fingers!' There seems a dreadful fitness in the very form
of the phrase. Other people may die, may be killed.
Prue would just slip away! Oh, if he had but used another
form of expression! As she lies on her wakeful,[Pg 144]
anxious bed, one couple of lines torments her with what
she feels to be its prophetic applicability:

Some day she will wake to find her arms empty of little
Prue, whom for seventeen fond years they have girdled.
That Prue has always been sickly and often forward, has
from the moment of her birth caused her far more pain
than pleasure, makes no sort of difference. The sea does
not reckon how many little rills run into it. A great
love has no debit and credit account; it gives vastly,
not inquiring for any return. People in weak health,
who can become genuinely moribund upon opposition,
possess a weapon which the sound cannot pretend to
emulate.

On the evening of the day of Margaret's visit to the
Vicarage Freddy Ducane had unexpectedly returned to
the Manor.

'I believe that that wretched little Prue is going to die
on purpose to spite Peggy for not letting her go to the
Harboroughs!' says milady crossly, vexed at her nephew's
serene flower face. 'I cannot think what possessed you to
put such an idea into her stupid little head!'

And Freddy looks mournful, and answers sweetly that
he supposes it is useless his trying to explain that he had
no hand in the matter, but that he is afraid he shall never
be able to inflict gratuitous pain upon any one as long as
he lives.

Despite his assertion of innocence, he has in his pocket
a second letter of invitation from Lady Betty for Prue,
which he reads with her next day under the Judas-tree
while Peggy is away at the workhouse. She comes back a
little too soon, before the reading is quite finished, just in
time to see Prue stick the note hastily into her pocket.[Pg 145]
At this gesture her heart sinks—Prue is beginning to look
upon her as an enemy.

'You need not hide your letter, Prue. I am not going
to ask to see it,' she says, in a wounded voice, either forgetting
or omitting to make any salutation to Freddy.

Prue reddens.

'I should not have hidden it, only that I knew it would
make you angry,' she answers, with a sort of trembling
defiance. 'Lady Betty has invited me again. I cannot
help it; it is not my fault.'

Freddy has risen, and, scenting a coming storm, follows
his instincts by beginning to edge away.

'How bad of you—you dear Peg!' cries he affectionately,
holding out both hands—'to come back just as I am obliged
to be off! That is the way you always treat me—is not
it, Prue?'

'You needn't go,' replies Margaret, neglecting his hands,
and looking rather sternly at him. 'I shall not be here a
moment; and we are not going to quarrel, if that is what
you are afraid of. Prue, since Lady Betty is so urgent,
and you wish it so much, tell her that you will go to her.'

Then she leaves them with a steady step, but when she
reaches her own room her tears gush out. That gesture
of Prue's hand to her pocket has cut her to the quick;
Prue, whose one first impulse through all her seventeen
years' span has hitherto been to run to her sister with
whatever of good or bad—be it broken head or new doll—fate
has brought her. That one small gesture tells her
that the old habit is for ever broken, and she cries bitterly
at it. She may cry as much as she pleases during the
silent fortnight that follows, certain that neither Mink nor
the cat will ask her why; but she does not weep again.
Through the gossamer-dressed September mornings, and
the gold-misted September noons, she lives alone. Alone
with her thoughts—thoughts none the less worth thinking[Pg 146]
perhaps for their new tinge of deep sadness—with her
unpretending charities, with Jacob and her hollyhocks. It
is a novel experience, since never before in all Prue's little
life has she borne to have the child out of her sight for as
much as a week.

Three months ago she would have thought it too hard
a thing to have asked of her to forego Prue's songs and
kisses for a whole fortnight; but of late Prue herself has
so entirely robbed their intercourse of its old confident
sweetness, has put such a bitter sting into it, that for the
first few days after her departure Peggy (albeit with self-reproach)
experiences a sense of relief in no longer meeting
the small miserable face with its mute and dogged upbraidings.
So little does she dread her own company that she
avails herself but sparingly even of such society as is within
her reach, i.e. that of the Manor and milady, with her spud
and frieze-coat; that of the Vicarage with its stocking-basket
and its Earthly Paradise. The only visitors of
whom she sees much are the little Harboroughs, who still
adorn the Manor nurseries, and call upon her almost daily,
with that utter absence of misgiving as to being always
welcome that few people—and those only the most consummate
bores—are able to preserve in later life.

She likes them—the boy best; and even if she herself
is not quite in tune for their chatter, there is always the
red fox to pant at them, with pretty cunning face and hot
wild breath, from behind the wire walls of his house; the
pump to wet their clothes, and the stable kittens to scratch
them. So no wonder that they come every day. She
would enjoy their conversation more if it did not involve
so ceaseless a reference to one whom she has neither the
need nor the desire to have thus hauled back into her
memory. But it seems as if John Talbot had been so
inwoven with the very woof of their lives that no anecdote
of their little past is complete without it. She could[Pg 147]
endure it, however, if they confined themselves to anecdotes.
It is the perpetual appeal to her for her opinion about him
that she finds so trying.

'Oh, Miss Lambton! do not you like John Talbot?
When is he coming back? Do not you wish he would
come and live with you here always? Do you like him
better than father? Franky says he does. Is not it
naughty of him?'

And the questions of childhood are not like those of a
maturer age, which may be evaded or put aside. They
must and will be directly answered. Peggy cannot help
a vexed internal laugh as she hears herself, allowing that
she likes John Talbot, asseverating that she has no wish
that he should come and live with her always, and explaining
that it is possible to appreciate him and father too.
But she is always deeply thankful when the conversational
charms of Alfred the stable-boy, or the chicken-feeding
hour, or any other timely distraction releases her from
this trying interrogatory. Of John Talbot, except through
the too glib tongues of his little partisans, she has heard
absolutely nothing. On the morning of his departure she
had sent his Keats and one or two other of his books up
to the Manor after him.

As she was neatly wrapping them in paper a sprig of
lavender fell out of the Keats—a sprig which, as she remembered,
he had put in as a mark into the unfinished
'Eve of St. Agnes,' on their last reading. She stooped
and picked it up, looking hesitatingly at it. Shall she
return it to its place? Why should she? No one could
ever connect the idea of Betty with lavender. Gardenias
would bring her image at once—gardenias wired and
overpowering; but the clean and homely lavender—never!
She throws it pensively away; and as she does so a foolish
fancy comes over her, as if it were herself that she had
just been tossing away out of his life! That he acquiesces[Pg 148]
in that tossing away is but too evident. He does not even
send her a formal line to acknowledge the receipt of his
restored property. So it is not his fault that his image
walks beside her so often down the garden alleys; both
at high blue noon and when, on fair nights, she steps
abroad to look at the thronged stars.

One must think of something; and there are many
interstices in her thoughts which cannot all be filled up
by the one topic—Prue. Into them he creeps; the more
so as she lives almost wholly in her garden; and with that
his memory is so entangled that there is scarcely a plant
that does not say something to her of him. She thinks of
him always without bitterness; generally with deep compassion;
never with any hope of pulling lavender with
him again. But she thinks of him. Perhaps there was
some truth in Betty's fleer, of her never having known
any better company than that of the village apothecary.
The only outward incidents of her life come in the shape
of Prue's letters. These begin by being long and full of
ecstasies; end by being short and full of nothing.

Before the first week is over they are hurried up, ere
the sheet is full, with some excuse. She must go and get
dressed to go out riding. They are just off to a tennis-party.
They are to go out shooting with the men. The
expressions of enjoyment grow fewer in each. Yet in not
one is the slightest wish expressed for a return home. In
fact, before the fortnight ends comes a feverish note,
evidently written in hot haste and deep excitement, begging
for a further reprieve of a week. It gives Peggy a little
fresh pang to notice that this petition is urged as a criminal
might urge some request upon his executioner, not as one
would beg a boon of a tender friend.

But she is used to such pain now; rises up and lies
down with it; and to-day puts it patiently aside. What
she cannot put aside is her perplexity as to how to answer.[Pg 149]
She has a deep repugnance against complying; and yet
the memory of her terror at Prue's rapid decline upon her
former opposition makes her tremblingly shrink from
adopting a course that may all too probably bring back
that condition. She dares not decide upon her own responsibility.
She will consult milady.

On her way to the Manor she goes round by the
Vicarage, and looks in. Over the lawn there is a festal
air. It is evident that the little Evanses have been
drinking tea out of doors, in honour of a visit from Miss
and Master Harborough. The Vicar is nowhere to be seen;
a fact which does not surprise Peggy, as she knows that
any signs of conviviality on the part of his children are
apt to make him disappear.

On catching sight of her Franky Harborough precipitates
himself towards her as fast as his fat legs will carry
him. He is in wild spirits, and has evidently, on his own
showing, been extremely naughty.

'Oh, we have been having such fun!—we have had tea
out of doors! Mrs. Evans said that the next child who
shook the table so as to upset anything should have no
tea! I,' with a chuckle, 'had finished my tea, so I gave
it a good shake!'

He looks so rosily delighted with his own iniquity, and
is so flatteringly glad to see her, that poor Peggy, who
feels as if not many people were glad to see her nowadays,
has not the heart to rebuke him.

With her admirer's small soft hand tightly clutching hers,
she advances to where, under a copper beech's shade, sits
Mrs. Evans—the stocking-basket banished, and engaged upon
some genteeler industry—in company with a female friend.

'We were just talking of you,' says the Vicar's wife,
putting out a welcoming hand. 'Let me introduce you to
my cousin, Miss Jones; she has been staying in the neighbourhood
of the Harboroughs; she saw Prue.'[Pg 150]

'Did you indeed?' cries Peggy, turning with anxious
interest to the new comer. 'Was she well? Did she look
well?'

'She looked extremely well.'

'She must have been very well indeed, I should think,'
adds Mrs. Evans, with a meaning smile. It is a smile of
such significance that, for a moment, Peggy dares not ask
an explanation of it; and before she can frame her question
Mrs. Evans goes on. 'How very oddly people seem to
amuse themselves in smart houses nowadays!—one never
heard of such things when I was a girl; but I suppose, as
it is the fashion, it is all right.'

'They seemed to be enjoying themselves very thoroughly,'
replies the latter, with a prim evasive smile.

'They were all driving donkey tandems full gallop down
the main street of the town,' cries Mrs. Evans, taking up
the tale; 'it seems that there is a town about three miles
from Harborough Castle. Prue was driving one!'

'Prue?'

'Yes, Prue! I was as much surprised as you can be;
but it must have been Prue; there was no other unmarried
girl there!' Peggy is silent. 'My cousin says it was
wonderful how she got her donkeys along! She was at
the head of the party; and they were all shouting—shouting
at the top of their voices!' Still Margaret makes no
comment. 'My cousin says that the whole town turned
out to look at them; they were all at their doors and
windows. I am sure so should I have been,' with a laugh;
'but it seems a childish romp for grown-up people, does not
it?'

Peggy's answer is a slight assenting motion of the head,
but her words are not ready. Her eyes seem fixed atten[Pg 151]tively
on the distant gambols of the children—on Lily
Harborough swarming a cherry-tree, and being pulled
down by the leg by an indignant nurse; on Franky
giving a covert pull to the end of the white tea table-cloth,
in the pious hope of precipitating all the teacups to
the ground.

'Another day,' pursues Mrs. Evans cheerfully, 'they
drove into the town and bought all the penny tarts at the
confectioner's, and pelted one another with them in the
open street.'

Peggy has at length recovered her speech.

'It was very, very stupid,' she says, in a voice of acute
annoyance; 'senseless. But after all there was no great
harm in it.'

'Of course one does not know what they did indoors,'
rejoins Mrs. Evans, as if, though a good-natured woman,
unavoidably anxious to knock even this prop from under
our poor Peggy. 'People said—did not they?' turning to
her cousin—'that they sat up smoking till all hours of
the night, and ran in and out of each other's rooms; and
the ladies put things in the men's beds——'

'I am afraid I must be going on,' interrupts Margaret,
starting up as if she had been stung; 'I have to see Lady
Roupell.'

She takes leave abruptly. It seems to her as if she
should not be able to draw her breath properly until she is
alone. She pants still as she walks on over the stubble
fields, across the park, under the September trees, whose
green seems all the heavier and deeper for their nigh-coming
change of raiment. She pants at the recollection of the
picture just drawn for her of her Prue—her Prue—shouting,
smoking, making apple-pie beds!

Her worry of mind must have written itself upon her
face, for no sooner has she joined milady, whom she finds
out in the shrubberies leaning on her spade, like Hercules[Pg 152]
upon his club, than the old lady asks sharply what she has
been doing to herself.

'Nothing that I know of,' replies Peggy, 'except that I
have been rather bothered.'

'Prue, eh?'

'Yes.'

'What about her now?' with a slight accent of impatience.

'She wants to stay away another week.'

'And have you given her leave?'

'I came to ask your advice.'

Milady is neatly squirting a plantain or two out of the
turf. She waits until she has finished before answering.
Then she says with decision:

'Have her back.'

'You think so? But if,' very anxiously, 'she falls ill
again as soon as she gets home?'

'Pish!' rejoins the other in a fury; 'give her a dose of
jalap and a whipping.'

But Peggy does not even smile.

'Have you—have you heard anything of the party?'
she asks hesitatingly; 'of whom it consists, I mean? Prue
is not very communicative. Is Lady Clanranald there still?'

'No, she is gone,' replies milady shortly, digging her
weapon into a dandelion. 'She could not stand it. Betty
is an ass!'

Could not stand it!

In a dismayed silence Margaret awaits further explanation,
but none comes. Milady, whatever she may know, is
evidently determined not to be diffuse on the subject.

'Have her home!' repeats she briefly, lifting her shrewd
old eyes to Peggy's, and replacing her billycock hat on the
top of the cap from which her stooping attitude has nearly
dismounted it; 'have her home, and do it as quickly as
possible.'

Beyond this piece of short but very definite advice,[Pg 153]
nothing is to be got out of her. She will explain neither
why Lady Clanranald took flight nor why Betty is an ass.

In an uneasiness all the deeper for the vagueness of
milady's implications, Peggy takes her way home to her
little solitary Red House, and writes the letter which is to
summon Prue back.

But with how many tears is that letter penned! How
many fond and anxious apologies! Wrapped in what a
mantle of loving phrases does the unpalatable fiat go forth!
However, it has gone now, and there is nothing for her but
to await its result. Between the day on which it was sent
and that appointed for Prue's homecoming there is ample
time for an answer to be returned; but none comes. The
day arrives; the servant who is to be Prue's escort sets off
in the early morning, and through the long hours, forenoon,
noon, afternoon, Peggy waits. Not in idleness though.
She is hard at work from dawn till sunset, cooking, gardening,
rearranging, planning surprises that are her fatted calves
for the prodigal. As she works her spirits rise. The small
house looks so bright; perhaps, after all, Prue will not be
very sorry to find herself back in it; and how pleasant it
will be to hear her little voice singing about the garden,
and to see her jumping over the tennis-net with Mink again!
Mink has not jumped over the tennis-net once since she left.
With a lightened heart Peggy stoops to ask him why he has
not, but he answers only by a foolish smirk.

The expected moment has come. For half an hour
beforehand Peggy has been standing at the garden-end
straining her eyes down the road, and making up her mind
that there must have been an accident. But at length the
slow station fly with its dusty nimbus heaves in sight, rolls
in at the gate, stops at the door.

Before Prue can well emerge her sister has her in her
arms.

'Oh, Prue! how nice it is to have you back! How are[Pg 154]
you? Have you enjoyed yourself? Are you a little glad
to see me?'

Prue's first remark can hardly be said to be an answer
to any of these questions. She has disengaged herself from
her sister, and stands staring round, as if half-bewildered.

Prue does not look like herself. She has an oddly-shaped
hat; there is something unfamiliar about the
dressing of her hair; and can it be fatigue or dust that has
made her so extremely black under the eyes.

'What a squeezy little place!' she says slowly, with an
accent half of wonder, half of disgust. 'Surely it must
have shrunk since I went away!'

CHAPTER XVIII

A wretched month follows—a month of miserable misery—misery,
that is, that springs from no God-sent misfortune;
that has none of that fateful greatness to which we bow
our heads, stooping meekly before the storm of the inevitable;
but a misery that is paltry and reasonless—one
of those miseries that we ourselves spin out of the web of
our own spoilt lives. It seems such a folly and a shame to
be miserable in the face of these yellow October days that
by and by steal in, pranked out in the cheerful glory of
their short-lived wealth, with such a steadfast sun throwing
down his warmth upon you from his unchanging blue
home; with a park full of such bronze bracken to push
through at your very door; and with such an army of
dahlias, ragged chrysanthemums, and 'Good-bye-Summers,'
with their delicate broad disks, to greet you morning after
morning as you pass in your pleasant ownership along
their gossamered ranks.

So Peggy feels; but that does not hinder her from
being wretched to her very heart's core. The inside world
may throw a sunshine on the outside one, as we all know—may
make June day out of January night—'the winter
of our discontent' into glorious summer; but the outside
can throw no sunshine on the inside unless some is there
already. So Peggy's 'Good-bye-Summers,' though they
never in their lives have flowered for her so beautifully
before, smile at her in vain. She has no answering[Pg 156]
gladness to give them back. It has not taken twenty-four
hours from the time of her return to prove that it has
become absolutely impossible to please Prue. It is nothing
that, on the first evening of her arrival, she has, as it were,
walked over all poor Peggy's little planned surprises without
even perceiving them; that she has turned her dinner over
disdainfully, and remarked how much worse Sarah cooks
than when she went away. These may be but the childish
fretfulnesses engendered of fatigue, and that a good night's
rest will sweep away. But when twenty-four hours have
passed, when a week, when a fortnight have gone by, and
find her still cavilling at the smallness of the rooms, the
garden's confined space, and the monotony of their lives,
then, indeed, Margaret's spirits sink as they have never
sunk before.

The one definite property that Prue seems to have
brought back from her Harborough visit is a sickly and
contemptuous disgust for whatever had formerly given her
pleasure; a standard by which to measure all the conditions
of her own life, and find them grossly wanting. About
the visit itself she is singularly reticent. Not a word
does she breathe of her own prowess in donkey tandem-driving;
not a hint does she let drop of any midnight
gambols.

Once and again Margaret sadly fancies that she sees
faint signs of the old lifelong habit of telling her everything
trying to reassert its sway; but in a moment it is
checked. Often Prue seems to her sister like a child who,
engaged in some naughtiness, has been charged by its
confederates not to tell. And Prue does not tell. Yet,
from indications which she cannot help letting fall, Peggy
gathers that the visit has not been all pleasure; that fits
of bitter disappointment, sharp jealousy, grisly disillusion,
freaked the surface of its feverish joy. And yet Freddy
had been a co-guest with her through the whole fortnight![Pg 157]
This fact Margaret has elicited by direct inquiry; it would
never have been volunteered.

'Come, Prue,' she says coaxingly, on the morning after
the young girl's return, as they stroll about the garden,
whose flowers Prue notices only to disparage, 'I let you off
last night because you were so sleepy, but you must tell
me something about your visit now. Was Freddy
there?'

'Yes.'

'All the time?'

'Yes.'

'Did you see much of him?'

A slight hesitation, and then an accent of impatience:

'Of course. Were not we staying in the same house?'

'And—and—did Mr. Harborough mount you? You
know, don't you—I told you, I think,' a beam of pleasure
shining in her anxious blue eyes—'that milady has lent
you the little gray mare for the whole winter?'

'I do not think that I care for riding as much as I did,'
replies Prue listlessly, plucking the seed-vessel from an
overblown dahlia in the border beside her, and idly
scattering the seeds over the walk. 'We did not ride
much; there were so many more amusing things to do.'

'What sort of things?'

'Oh, they would not have amused you!'

'How do you know that, until you tell me what they
were?'

'Oh, they would not have amused you; you are not
easily amused. He always says so; and besides,' sinking
down with a sigh on the bench under the Judas-tree, 'of
what use to talk of them now they are over?'

For a second Peggy shrinks into herself in baffled
discouragement, but immediately recovers. She will not
be so easily disheartened.

'If they are so amusing,' she says cheerfully, 'perhaps[Pg 158]
we might adopt some of them here. We are not above
learning, are we?'

Prue smiles disdainfully, curling her childish nose.

'In these extensive grounds?'

Nor as time goes on does she grow more communicative
about her visit, though it is clear that its incidents occupy
her thoughts to the exclusion of all other subjects, and
though its influence may be traced in each fragment of her
sparse talk. It is one of Peggy's severest daily penalties
to recognise in her sister's languid speech continually
recurring phrases of Betty's; thin echoes of her flippancies.
Prue is even growing to have a dreadful likeness to her
model. Possibly this may arise only from Betty's old hat,
which she persistently wears; or from the mode of hair-dressing,
slavishly copied from her original. That the now
fixed bloom in her cheek may be derived from the same
source as Lady Betty's, and cause the undeniable resemblance
that exists between them, is a supposition too bad
to be faced, and that Peggy drives away from her mind
as soon as it presents itself. But it recurs. How many
disagreeable things do not recur nightly as she lays her
head on that pillow which is oftener than not wetted with
her tears?

'Oh, why did I let her go?' she sobs. 'Why did I
take any one's advice? What has happened to her? What
shall I do? It is not my Prue at all that has come back
to me!'

Now and again, indeed, there is a tantalising glimpse
of the old Prue, hidden away, as it were, behind the new
one. Once, twice, there is a curly head resting voluntarily
on Peggy's knees; thin arms thrown—and oh, how thankfully
welcomed!—round her glad neck; a little voice
plaining to her of some small physical ill, with a touch of
the old childish confidence in Peggy's power to kiss any
wound well. But in a moment she is gone again; and[Pg 159]
the new Prue, the dreadful, new, cynical, imitation Betty
Prue is back. It is this new Prue who daily steals with
surreptitious haste to meet the postman, lest the eyes,
whose love has enveloped her through life, should now
dare to alight upon her correspondence. And yet Peggy
knows by the after-mood of the day, as well as if she had
scanned superscription and seal, whether or not the expected
missive has come. Judging by this test, the
postman is for Prue, far oftener than not, empty-handed.
Once, twice, as Margaret learns from Lady Roupell, Freddy
is expected at the Manor. Once, twice, at the last moment,
some motive of exalted self-sacrifice prompts him to telegraph
that he is unable to come. And now he can no
longer be expected, for mid-October is here; the Universities
have reopened their long-shut arms to their
children, and Freddy has returned to Oxford. To add
still further to the discomfort of the situation, the weather,
hitherto so far beyond praise, becomes suddenly as much
beyond blame. There follows a week of pouring, tearing,
ruthless rain. The 'Good-bye-Summers' say good-bye indeed.

Three days after the fall of this final blow to Prue's
hopes the two girls meet milady coming out of morning
church; milady in her reluctant and temporary divorce
from her spud and frieze-coat. They walk down the
yellow, leaf-strewn church-path with her, as they always
do, while she throws her brusque nods, and her good-hearted
greetings to her fellow-worshippers. As she seats
herself in the carriage she pulls a letter accidentally out
of her pocket with her pocket-handkerchief.

'Oh, by the bye,' says she, 'I heard this morning from
Freddy; I came away in such a hurry that I had not half
time to read it. If I had been a little farther off the
Vicar,' laughing, 'I would have read it during the sermon.
(Poor dear man!' in a loud aside, 'he really ought to
treat us to a new one.) Freddy says that he is ill.'[Pg 160]

'Ill, is he?'

'So he says,' with a shrug. 'He says that he has caught
a chill. Oh, I am not very much disturbed,' laughing
again. 'I daresay that we are not going to lose him this
time. You know he always cries out some time before he
is hurt.'

She rolls cheerfully away, resuming the reading of her
letter as she goes. Peggy turns apprehensively to her
sister. The congregation have all issued into road and
bridle-path, and they are alone. Peggy has time for an
impulse of thankfulness that such is the case; for Prue is
leaning, whiter than her pocket-handkerchief, against the
lych-gate.

'Ill!' she says gaspingly, under her breath. 'Ill! and
all alone! nobody with him!'

'Pooh!' replies Peggy lightly, and with a half tone of
contempt. 'I daresay it is not much; he is always
frightened about himself. Do not you remember the time
when he thought he was going into a consumption, and
bid us all good-bye? How white you look, darling! Had
not you better sit down a moment? Take my arm.'

But Prue will not sit down—will not take her sister's
arm. She walks home unhelped, and on getting there,
refuses all Peggy's simple cordials. But she leaves her
luncheon untouched, and is out the whole afternoon on a
long aimless, solitary ramble. She comes in again a full
hour after dusk has fallen, and, complaining of headache,
goes to bed. The next morning she is up, and at her usual
stand, lying in ambush for the postman. After he is gone
Peggy catches distant glimpses of her walking up and
down the kitchen garden, reading a letter. She has heard,
then, from him. Thank God! Perhaps her heart will be
more at ease.

With her own mind relieved, Margaret goes about her
morning's work with a better courage; and it is eleven[Pg 161]
o'clock before she again thinks of her sister. The striking
of the hour reminds her that Prue will probably forget to
take her tonic, and that it will be safer to administer it
herself. She pours it out, and opening the drawing-room
door, calls 'Prue! Prue!' There is no answer. She moves
to the foot of the stairs and repeats her call, 'Prue!' No
answer. She sets the glass down upon a table, and runs
into the garden. 'Prue! Prue!' There is an answer this
time, but unfortunately it is not the right one. It is the
parrot officiously replying, 'Yes,'m,' in the cook's voice.
She re-enters the house. Possibly Prue may be in her
own room—one of her new tendencies is to lock herself in
there for hours together—and with the door shut Peggy's
summonses may, though in so small a house it is not
likely, have remained unheard. She runs up and knocks.
No answer. She turns the handle, the door opens, and
she looks in. In vain! The room is empty. She can see
this at a glance. It is not likely that Prue is hiding in
her own cupboard, or beneath her narrow chintz bed; and
yet her sister, pushed by what vague suspicion she does not
know, enters. A note in Prue's handwriting and addressed
to herself, lying on the small writing-table in the window,
at once catches her eye. In an instant she has sprung
upon and torn it open. What is this? There is neither
beginning nor ending; only a few unsteady lines straggling
across a sheet of paper:

'I have not asked your leave, because I knew that you
would not give it; but I could not—could not let him die
alone. Oh, Peggy, do not be very angry with me! I am
so miserable, and I could not help it.'

That is all. It has not taken Margaret two seconds
to master the contents; and having done so, she stands
vacantly staring at the empty envelope still held in her[Pg 162]
hand. It is a minute or two before she has recovered her
wits enough to realise that it is not yet empty; that it
contains a second sheet. This is in a different handwriting,
one of those small, clear, clever handwritings affected by
the cultured youth of the day.

'Ch. Ch. Oxford.

'My Prue,

'Send me a little word. I am suffering, and I am
all alone. I am scratching you these few pencil-lines in
case—as, I fear, is too probable—I may be too ill to write
to-morrow. Oh, my Prue! "The whole head is sick, and
the whole heart faint." What would not I give for one of
your little cold white hands to lay on my throbbing brow?

'Your

'Freddy.'

It was only with a half comprehension—so stunned was
she—that Peggy had read Prue's missive; but at the end
of Freddy's the dreadful white light of full understanding
breaks upon her soul. Prue has gone to Oxford!—gone
to fulfil young Ducane's aspiration—to 'lay her little cold
hand on his throbbing brow.' Can it be possible? Can
even Prue's madness have gone so far? She snatches up
her sister's note again, and greedily reads it afresh, in the
wild hope of finding that she has mistaken its drift. Alas!
there is no room for misapprehension. If she need further
confirmation of her worst fears it comes in the voice of
Sarah, who looks in, duster in hand, through the half-open
door.

'Please, 'm, did you want Miss Prue? She has gone
out.'

'Gone out!' repeats Margaret breathlessly. Then,
making a great effort over herself for composure, she adds,
'Yes, yes, I know; how did she go? did she walk or drive?'

'Indeed, 'm, I did not much notice. I happened to look
out of the passage window as I was dusting the stairs, and I
saw her drive off; it must be the best part of an hour ago.'

The best part of an hour ago! Like lightning it dawns
upon Peggy that a train leaves her station for Oxford at
ten minutes to eleven. It is a slow one, as all must be
which draw up at the little wayside platform; not so slow,
however, but that a crawl of a hundred and twenty minutes
will land Prue as hopelessly beyond her power of reach as
if it were the 'Flying Dutchman' itself, at Oxford station.
She is as little able to hinder her sister from forcing her
mad way into the young man's room as she would be to
stop God's lightning from splitting the tree it is appointed
to rend.

With a gesture of rage and despair she dashes Freddy's
note to the ground, and flings her own head down on the
open blotting-book whose pages keep the imprint, scarcely
dry, of her sister's insane words. But in a few minutes
she has pulled herself together. There is only one thing
for her to do—to follow and overtake her sister as quickly
as possible. As quickly as possible! But how quickly is
that? This is the first thing to be discovered.

She goes down into the cheerful hall, where the birds
in their big cage are swinging on John Talbot's ladder, and
chattering to each other as jovially as if no disaster had
fallen on their roof-tree; where Mink is lying on his small
hairy side in a sun-patch, with his little paws crossed like
a dying saint's. Margaret searches for the Bradshaw,
which apparently Sarah has tidied away. Her first impulse
is to call to her, and ask where she has put it; but her
second corrects it. Why should the household learn any
sooner than is unavoidable that Prue has fled?[Pg 164]

By and by she discovers the missing volume, and sitting
down, buries herself in its pages. What she had feared is
realised. There is no second train for Oxford until 2.15.
Three hours of forced inaction stretch before her—three
hours for Prue to carry out whatever cureless folly her
burning heart and rudderless mind may dictate.

She starts up. To sit still with such thoughts for
company is out of the question. She wanders back again
to Prue's room, picks up Freddy's note which she had left
in her ire lying on the carpet; tears both it and Prue's
into small pieces, and throws them into the grate; then,
misdoubting their being sufficiently destroyed, collects the
fragments again and burns them—tears out even that sheet
of the blotting-book upon which Prue had dried her words,
and burns it too.

Then she goes downstairs, and looks at the clock. It
has seemed to her as if she had been a long time over her
burning. Yet the clock-hand points only to a quarter past
eleven. She must force herself to some occupation. To
read is impossible. Needlework and gardening both sharpen
instead of deadening thought. It is the day for doing up
the week's accounts. She will compel herself to do them
as usual. But the figures swim before her eyes. The
simplest addition baffles her. The names of Prue, Freddy,
Oxford, force themselves into her record of expenditure,
making nonsense of it, defacing her neat columns; and
after half an hour's vain efforts, she desists with a sigh.
When one o'clock comes at last she sits down to luncheon,
calmly telling Sarah that she does not expect Prue back;
and having obliged herself, for the sake of appearances, to
eat something, she puts on her hat and jacket.

Leaving word with her household as indifferently as she
can that they are not to be surprised if she and her sister
are late in returning, she sets forth on her walk to the
station. She has reflected that she would start early, in[Pg 165]
order to give herself plenty of time to walk slowly. But
she does not walk slowly; she walks fast; towards the
end she runs. Who knows whether her clocks may not be
slow? whether on coming in sight of the little upstart red-brick
house that constitutes the station, she may not see
the train sliding away without her? She arrives breathless,
to find that she has half an hour to wait—half an hour in
which to admire the station-master's canariensis and his
mignonette, which greets each dusty train-load with its
whiff of perfume.

By and by another intending traveller or two arrive.
The Manor omnibus drives up, and disgorges the little
Harboroughs and their nurses. Peggy had known and
forgotten that they were to return home to-day. She feels
rather guilty at her own cold inability to echo their loud
expressions of pleasure at this unexpected meeting with
her. But they apparently detect no lack of warmth in her
answering greetings, as they each at once take possession of
one of her hands, and march up and down with her. In
the intervals of a searching interrogatory as to the goal and
object of her journey, they continue a quarrel apparently
begun in the omnibus; putting out their red tongues at
each other before her face, and executing agile kicks at
one another's legs behind her back.

When the train draws up they insist upon deserting
their own suite and getting in with her. She had rather
that they would not have done so; and yet perhaps it
affords a wholesome diversion from her own thoughts to be
continually jumping up to grasp Franky by the seat of his
sailor-trousers, and hinder him from breaking his neck by
tumbling out of the window, or his legs by his endeavours to
climb up into the netting. Lily is not nearly so troublesome.
She is sitting quite still, and showing off; trying, that is, to
impress by her remarks two quiet ladies who are fellow-occupants
of the carriage with a sense of her importance.[Pg 166]

'I hope,' she says, in a loud voice, 'that my large box
is in;' as she speaks she turns her eyes upon the strangers
to see whether they look awed; but as they do not, she
adds, in a still louder key, 'because it is full of clothes!'

The train slides on through the bright-dyed autumn
country; past the flooded flat meadows lying a-dazzle in
the sun, blinding mirrors for the gorgeous October trees;
across and then again across the broad ribbon of the silver
Thames; past distant country houses, lifting their shoulders
out of the gold and red billows of their elms and beeches;
past big villages and little towns, till, after several previous
stoppages, they come to a standstill at the platform of a
small station, as destitute of importance as the one from
which they set off. It is that at which the little Harboroughs
are to get out.

'Mammy is coming to meet us,' Lily had announced;
'she will give Franky such a hug! She never hugs me—I
am father's child.'

She throws one final look at her fellow-travellers, to see
whether they are not rather struck by the last statement,
before joining her brother at the window, and jostling her
hat against his in the endeavour to have the glory of
obtaining the first glimpse of their common parent. Of
this, however, she is balked, as, whatever may be her after-assertions
to the contrary, there is no doubt that the shrill
cries of boy and girl, 'There she is!' 'There's mammy!'
rang out absolutely simultaneous.

Their curly heads fill up the window-space so completely
that Peggy, for a moment, hopes to escape detection and
recognition. She hopes it the more, since, for the first
minute, Betty has no eyes save for her boy, whom she has
caught in her arms; relieving Peggy at length from her
convulsive hold of his small-clothes, and burying him under
a perfect smother of kisses.

'My blessing—my beauty! so I have got you back at[Pg 167]
last! You must never—never leave your poor mammy
again! Well, Lily, how are you? Goodness, child, what
a figure you are! You are one large freckle! Oh, Miss
Lambton, is that you? Where are you off to? Is Prue
with you? No? What fun Prue is! I had no idea until
she stayed with me what capital fun she was. You must
let me have her again before long.'

The train moves off, and Margaret, a little heavier-hearted
than before, with it. Some impulse prompts her
to pull back the curtain of the little side-window in order
to watch, as long as it is in sight, that figure on the little
platform. Yes, Prue is certainly like her; but, alas! it is
to be not even a good imitation for which she has foregone
her own woodland grace. Margaret had forgotten how
pretty Betty was. How charming she looks now, with
her face full of wholesome mother-love, perfectly unconscious,
indifferent as to whether any one is looking at her
or not, clasping her little rosy child.

CHAPTER XIX

'Ox—ford! Ox—ford!' Her goal is reached; and as she
has no luggage, and is therefore independent of the scanty-numbered
and not particularly civil porters, in two minutes
after the stopping of the train she is in a hansom, spinning
up to Christ Church. At Tom Gate she gets out,
and rather timidly entering the archway, bends her steps
to the porter's lodge. He comes out politely to meet
her.

'Can you tell me where Mr. Ducane's rooms are?'

'Certainly, ma'am. Peckwater Quad, third door on the
left hand, second staircase.'

As she is moving off hurriedly in the direction indicated
her informant adds:

'I am afraid that you will not find him in, ma'am.'

'Not in?' repeats she, in a tone of the most acute
astonishment. 'Is not he ill, then?'

'Not that I am aware of, ma'am; he went out about
half an hour ago with a lady.'

At the mention of the lady a sudden vermilion flies up
into Peggy's face.

'Did you happen to notice,' she asks precipitately—'can
you tell me which way they—they went?'

'I think they may have been going to the meadows,
ma'am; they went out by the Hall.'

Almost before he can lift his finger to point out the line
she is to take she is off upon it. Across the wide quad[Pg 169]
she speeds, under the exquisite stone umbrella that has
held itself for over three centuries above the staircase up
which thousands of stalwart young feet have tramped to
their dinner in the Hall. Along the still, gray cloisters;
past the mean flimsiness of the new buildings, erected
apparently as a bad practical joke, out into the sunshine
and dignity of the Broad Walk.

She stands for a moment or two uncertainly, looking
from the new avenue to the old one. From the stripling
rows of limes and poplars which will shade 1900 and 2000—those
strange-faced centuries, of which we that are having
our little innings willy-nilly now, and will have had them
then, think with a certain startled curiosity—she turns to
the elm-veterans, who are paying their two-hundredth
tribute of amber and tawny leaves to the passing season.
Her eye travels the whole length of both long alleys; but
in neither does she discover a trace of the two figures she
is in quest of. Men in flannels she sees in plenty (men
they call themselves; but have men such smooth lady-faces?
do men laugh like that?)—men by twos and threes and
fours and ones going down to, or coming up from, the
glinting river. However, she cannot stand hesitating
for ever at the top of the diverging avenues; so, since
both hold out equally little promise to her, she takes the
Broad Walk. It is a bright, crisp afternoon. Above her
the elms, thinned of their leaf-crowns, arch their bicentenary
heads; the flooded meadow flashes argent on either
hand. Merton's gray-gabled front, rose-climbed, and
Magdalen's more distant tower lift their time-coloured faces
against the blue. On seats beneath the trees, with the
shadows, thinner than in high summer, stretching at their
feet, climbs here and there a child; rest an old man; sit a
pair of lovers. Here and there also—alas, too frequently!—comes
a gap in the ancient elm-brotherhood, ill filled by
some young puny twig, that shows where the storm laid[Pg 170]
low the honourable age of a giant whose green childhood
the Stuarts saw.

She has reached the end of the walk, and again glances
about her uncertainly. There is still no sign to be traced
of her truants having passed this way. Whither shall she
now bend her steps? She is not long in deciding. On her
right a narrower path stretches, following the windings of
the Cherwell—narrower, yet delectable too; tree-hung,
shadow-pranked, and with the flush river for companion.
The country round is all in flood; the fair town sitting
among the waters.

Margaret walks quickly along, her look anxiously thrown
ahead of her, eagerly asking of each new turn in the walk
to give her the sight she seeks. On she goes through the
golden weather. A great old willow, girthed like an oak,
golden too, stoops over the brimful stream that runs by, in
silent strength—stoops with a flooring of its own gold
beneath it. There is no wind to speak of; yet the trees
are dropping their various leaves on the Cherwell's breast.
She, speeding along all the while, watches them softly fall—a
horse-chestnut fan; a lime-leaf; a little shower of
willow-leaves, narrow and pointed like birds' tongues—softly
fall and swiftly sail away. At a better time who
would have enjoyed it all so much as she? but she draws
no grain of pleasure from it now. She can take none of
nature's lovely substitutes in the place of the two human
objects she is pursuing. If she does not find them here,
where else shall she seek them? What clue has she to
guide her?

With a sinking heart she is putting this question to
herself when, as the sight of the moored barges, the flash
of oars, the sound of shouting voices tell her that she is
nearing the spot where the Cherwell and Isis join in
shining wedlock, she comes suddenly upon them.

On the seat that runs round a tall plane-tree they are[Pg 171]
sitting side by side. At least they have not chosen any
very sequestered spot. His blonde head is thrown back,
and resting against the trunk; while from his lips a stream
of mellow words is pouring. He is obviously spouting
poetry; while she, in feverish unconsciousness of what she
is doing, tears into strips a yellow plane-leaf, her eyes
down-dropped, and a deeper stain than even that of Betty's
prescribing on her cheeks.

Some slight rustle of her gown must have betrayed her
neighbourhood. The lovers both spring to their feet; and
for a moment all three young people stand silently eyeing
each other. Prue's hot roses have vanished, but they have
not travelled far. It is perhaps a sign that there is still
some grace left in him, that they are now transplanted to
Freddy's cheeks. Margaret is the first to speak.

'I am here to take you home, Prue,' she says in a low
grave voice. 'Are you ready?'

'Come, Peggy dear!' cries the young man, recovering
his complexion and his aplomb, never very far out of reach;
'you need not look so tragic!—you quite frighten us! Do
not scold her much,' laying a coaxing hand on Peggy's arm;
'I have scolded her well myself already.'

'You!'

There is such a depth of contempt in this one monosyllable,
and it is so elucidated—if indeed it needed
elucidation—by the handsome lightning of her eye, that
Freddy's colour again changes.[Pg 172]

'I was coming home. I should have come home by the
next train,' falters Prue, hanging her head; and as this
tremulous explanation is received by her sister in a sorrowful
silence, she adds with passionate eagerness, 'He was ill,
really—very ill. It was not pretence—he was really ill.'

'No doubt,' replies Peggy, in withering quotation from
Freddy's own billet; '"the whole head was sick, and the
whole heart faint."'

Not vouchsafing him another word or look, she takes
her sister's unresisting arm, and leads her away. Without
exchanging a syllable, they reach St. Aldate's. Then
Peggy hails a hansom, and bids the cabman drive as
quickly as he can to the G. W. station. But both her
injunctions and his speed are vain. They gallop up
only to find the train, reduced by distance to a small puff
of smoke, steaming unattainably northwards. There is not
a second one for another hour and a half. There is nothing
for it but to wait. After all, as Peggy reflects with some
bitterness, they are not returning to such a very happy
home that they need be in any scrambling hurry to get
there.

In mid-October the days are already beginning to close
in early, and even before the light goes there comes a
sharpness into the air. It is blowing chilly through the
draughty station now. Peggy looks apprehensively at
Prue. Neither of them have had the forethought to bring
any wraps with them. Prue is shivering in a thin summer
jacket; her face looks weary, drawn, and cold.

'Had not you better go and rest in the waiting-room?'
asks Margaret solicitously, addressing her for the first time,
as she takes off her own cloak and wraps it round her.

'Yes, if you wish. I do not mind,' replies Prue
apathetically.

When she has been settled in the warmest corner, and her
vitality raised a little by a cup of hot tea, Peggy leaves her.[Pg 173]
There is a painful irksomeness in her company that makes
Peggy prefer to it even a silent and solitary march up and
down the platform, each footstep beating time to some
heavy thought. Her march is not destined to be solitary
for long, however. Before she has taken three turns a soft
young voice with an intonation of excessive deprecation
sounds at her elbow:

'May I take a stroll with you, dear?'

She does not deign him one syllable in answer, but walks
along as before, looking straight ahead. He sighs patiently.

'When you come to think it over, dear, I am sure you
will acknowledge that you are unjust. I can perfectly see
your side of the question. I think that one ought always
to try to see both sides; but whether you believe me or
not, I can assure you that I never was more horrified in my
life than I was this morning, when poor Prue walked in.'

And for once, at all events, Freddy speaks truth.

'Then why,' cries Peggy, blazing around upon him, 'did
you write and tell her you were dying? Why did you ask
her to come and "lay her little cold white hand upon your
burning brow"?'

Freddy winces; and the tone of his charming cheeks
rises several degrees.

'I do not quite know, dear, how you justify to yourself
the reading of other people's letters,' he says sweetly; 'but
if you must quote me, I had rather that you did it correctly.'

'Do you mean to say,' cries she, turning her great honest
eyes and her indignant rose face full upon him, 'that
you did not ask her to "lay her little cold white hand
upon——"'

'Oh, you need not say it all over again,' says Freddy,
writhing. 'How dreadful it sounds, hammered out in
that brutal voice! What a knack you have, Peggy, of
turning everything into prose! I did not ask her to lay
her hand upon my forehead; I said I should like it. So[Pg 174]
I should; so would you, if your head had been as hot as
mine was yesterday.' He pauses; but Peggy has no biting
rejoinder to make. 'If I had for a moment supposed,'
continues Freddy, 'that poor Prue would have taken it
au pied de la lettre, I would have cut off my right hand
before I would have written it. It is always so much less
painful,' he adds thoughtfully, 'to hurt one's self than to
hurt any one else.'

But Margaret does not seem much disarmed by this
touching sentiment.

'If you did not want her to come, why did you write
her that silly letter?' she asks doggedly.

Again Freddy changes colour.

'As I before observed, Peggy dear,' he answers, with
some symptoms of exasperation in his soft voice, 'I do not
think it would be a bad plan if you confined yourself to
your own correspondence.'

The girl's face flushes as much as his own has done.

'Prue left it for me to read,' she says coldly and proudly.
After a pause, drawing a long resolute breath, 'Well, next
time that you are dying, you will have to look out for
some other hand to cool your burning brow; for Prue's
will be beyond your reach.'

'So it was now,' rejoins Freddy, showing symptoms of
an inclination to lapse into levity. 'Poor Prue! she would
have had to make a long arm from the Red House here.'

'As soon as I get home,' continues Peggy, annoyed by,
and yet not deigning to notice, his frivolous interpellation,
'I shall put the house into the hands of a house-agent.
There is nothing left us—you have left us nothing but
to go!'

Her whole attitude and accent speak so deep a despondency
that Freddy's tendency to gaiety disappears. He feels
thoroughly uncomfortable; he wishes he had not come.
He would like exceedingly to slip away even now; but unfortunately
it is impossible.

'My dearest Peg,' he cries, in a very feeling voice, 'you
break my heart! You are always so self-sufficing, so apt
to rebut sympathy, that one hardly likes to offer it; but
if——'

'Sympathy!' she repeats, with a scornful lip that yet
trembles; 'sympathy from you, who are the cause of all my
wretchedness?'

'I?'

'Yes, you!' turning upon him with gathering passion—a
passion that is yet not loud in its utterance; that passes
unobserved by the few listeners about the station. 'Have
not you eyes to see that you are killing her? You might
have set yourself a task that would do your philanthropy
more credit than breaking an old friend's heart—than
turning a poor little childish head.'

Her voice wavers as she utters the last few words, and
she stops abruptly. Perhaps it is by accident that Freddy's
eye strays furtively to that spot on the platform where
'Way Out' is legibly inscribed.

'When you talk of "childish,"' he says, in an extremely
pained tone, yet one of gentle remonstrance, 'you seem to
forget that I am not so very old myself. You talk to me
as if I were a hoary-headed old sinner. Do you remember
that I shall not be twenty-one till Christmas?' She looks
at him with a sort of despair. What he says is perfectly
true. It seems ludicrous to arraign this pink and white
boy as guilty of the tragedy of her own and Prue's lives.
'I assure you, dear,' he says, in a very caressing tone,
drawing a little nearer to her side, 'I often have to tell
myself that I am grown up; I am so apt to forget it.'[Pg 176]
Then, as she is silent, he goes on, 'It would make our
relations so much easier, Peggy, if I could get you to
believe in me a little—mutual confidence is so much the
highest and wholesomest basis for human relations. I
think we ought all to try and trust one another; will not
you'—edging nearer still, and dropping his voice to a very
persuasive whisper—'will not you trust me a little?'

Peggy has heard that whisper many times before; has
heard it beguiling her into frequent concessions that her
judgment has disapproved. It is therefore with a very
unbelieving, even if half-relenting, voice that she asks:

'How much the better shall I be if I do?'

'It makes things so much easier if one feels that one is
believed in,' he says touchingly, if a little coaxingly. 'Oh,
Peggy dear, will not you believe in me? Will not you
trust me a little? Will not you wait—wait till I have
taken my degree? Then you shall see!'

In his eagerness he has seized her hand, unmindful of
the publicity of the place; and she, unmindful of it also, is
poring in disconsolate anxiety upon his features to see if
they look as if he were for once speaking the truth.

'See what?' she asks drily; but he apparently does not
hear the direct question.

'And you will not let the Red House?' he pursues
coaxingly. 'That was only a threat, was not it? Of
course, I can perfectly understand your irritation; but you
will not let it? Dear little house! if you only knew what
a sacred spot it is to me! And you yourself, Peggy—why,
you are like a limpet on your rock. You would be miserable
anywhere else.'

'Thanks to you, I am miserable there too,' replies she
bitterly.

She has withdrawn her hand sharply from him; and
they now again walk side by side along the platform,
begun to be lit up for the evening traffic.[Pg 177]

'I think,' says Freddy reproachfully, 'that if you at
all gauged the amount of pain that those sort of speeches
inflicted, you would be less lavish of them.' As she makes
no sort of rejoinder, he continues, with a heavy sigh,
'Where shall you go? Where shall you take her?'

'That can be no concern of yours,' replies she brusquely.
'It will at all events be beyond your pursuit.'

The moment that the word is out of her mouth she sees
that it is an unfortunate one; and, by the light of a gas-lamp
which they are at that moment passing, she detects
on Freddy's face a curious smile, which denotes the perception
in him of a certain humorousness in the present
employment of that particular noun.

In this case it is certainly not he that is the pursuer.
The station is growing fuller; a train must be expected;
not Peggy's, unfortunately, which is still not nearly due.
A good many undergraduates have appeared on the platform;
several recognise Freddy, and look curiously at his
companion. Whether it be their scrutiny that annoys her,
or the consciousness of the unlucky character of her last
phrase that gives added bitterness to her tone, it is with
some asperity that she makes her next observation:

'I hope you are not going to stay to see me off! I had
very much rather that you did not.'

'Of course I will not force my society upon you,'
replies Freddy in a melancholy voice, under which, however,
Margaret fancies that she detects a lurking alacrity;
'however much it may cost me, I will go at once, if you
bid me.'

'Then I do bid you,' she answers curtly.

'And you—you will not do anything rash?' he says,
looking extremely wheedling, and sinking his voice to a
coaxing whisper. 'You will let things go on just as they
are for a—for a little while? You—you will trust me?'

'You—you will not decide in a hurry; you will take
time to consider?' he pursues, with an agitation that seems
genuine, following her, for she has already begun resolutely
to walk away from him towards the waiting-room. 'You
will—you will do nothing rash?'

'I do not know what you call rash. I shall write to
the agent to-morrow.'

'You will not!' cries he, keeping up with her, and
trying to retard her progress. 'You could not be so inhuman.
I know that it is a matter of absolute indifference
to you what suffering you inflict upon me, but,' with a
tremble in his voice, 'you cannot, you must not hurt Prue!'

Again she gives that withering laugh.

'No, certainly not! I should not think of it; I leave
that to you! Good-bye!'

So saying she disappears determinedly from his vision
within the waiting-room door.

There is nothing left for him but to take the tears out
of his smile and the tremor out of his voice, and walk away.

Peggy is as good as her word. On the very next
morning she writes, as she had announced that she would,
to the local house-agent, putting the dear little Red House
into his hands. The deed is done. The letter lies with
others in the bag, awaiting the postman; and Peggy goes
out of doors to try and dissipate the deep sadness in which
her own deed, and much more its causes, have steeped her.
Into the garden first, but she does not remain there long.
It is too full of pain. Though it is mid-October, the frost
has still spared many flowers. There is still lingering
mignonette; plenty of Japanese anemones, their pure
white faces pearled with the heavy autumn dew; single
dahlias also, variously bright. It would have been easier
to walk among them with that farewell feeling had the
mignonette lain sodden and dead, and the dahlias been[Pg 179]
frost-shrivelled up into black sticks. But no! they still
lift their gay cheeks to the kiss of the crisp air.

How much longer we lure our flowers into staying with
us than we did twenty years ago! Perhaps by and by we
shall wile them into not leaving us at all.

To distract her thoughts from her sad musings Peggy
begins to talk to Jacob; but even he adds his unconscious
stab to those already planted in her heart. He can talk
of nothing but next summer. To escape from him she
leaves the garden, and passes out into the road. She
walks purposelessly about the lanes, careless of the splendour
of their brambles. She meets a detachment of Evanses
blackberry-laden, their plain faces smeared with blackberry
juice. They stop her to brag of their booty, and tell her
that she must come blackberrying with them next year.
Next year indeed!

She throws a friendly word of greeting across the hedge
to a cottager digging up his potatoes. He tells her they
are very bad, but he hopes she will see them better next
year. She looks in at a farm to 'change the weather'
with a civil farmer's wife, who shows her her chicken-yard,
and volunteers a neighbourly hope that she will be able to
give her a setting of game-fowl's eggs next summer. They
seem to have se donné le mot to tease her with their 'next
summer.'

She strays disconsolately home again to the little spoilt
house, only six months ago so innocently gay, so serenely
content, before Freddy came to lay its small joys in ashes.
Can it be because she is thinking of him that she seems to
see his wavy-haired head lying back in its old attitude on
the bench under the Judas-tree, with another head in close
proximity to it? She quickens her steps, but long before
she can reach the rustic seat Prue has fled to meet her
with a cry of joy.

At this now unfamiliar sign of welcoming poor Peggy's[Pg 180]
heart leaps for a moment up. Can it indeed be she that
Prue is so glad to see? But is this indeed Prue? this
radiant, transfigured creature, laughing, though her eyes
are brimming with divinely happy tears?

'Oh, Peggy, where have you been?' cries the young
girl, throwing her arms almost hysterically round her
sister's neck; 'I thought you were never coming! I have
been longing to tell you! Who was right? Who knew
him best? Did not I say it would be all right? No!
do not keep me! He will tell you!'

And away she speeds into the house, with Mink yapping
his congratulations at her heels, and the parrot rapping
out a friendly oath in Sarah's voice at her from the hall
window as she passes him.

In an agitation hardly inferior to Prue's, Margaret
advances to meet the young man, who has risen gracefully
from his lounge, and is coming to meet her.

'What does she mean by saying it is all right?' asks
Margaret sternly, and breathing quickly.

'It is very kind of dear Prue to put it that way,' replies
he quietly. 'I suppose she means that I have asked her
to be my wife. I have run over from Oxford on purpose,
without leave, and shall probably be sent down for it.
There is something a little comic, is not there, Peg,' breaking
into an ungovernable smile, 'in the idea of my having
a wife? Does it remind you at all of "Boots at the Holly-Tree
Inn"? Well, dear!' lapsing into a pensive and quasi
reproachful gravity, 'you see, you might have trusted me!
Be not afraid; only believe!'

CHAPTER XX

The autumn is throwing down its red and amber tributes
before other feet besides Margaret's; before Betty's, before
Talbot's. It does not, however, rain the same shower on
both. Betty's famed chestnuts supply no leaf for Talbot's
tread. For the first time for five years Harborough Castle
gets no share in John Talbot's autumn holiday. This is more
through his misfortune than his fault, as Betty, though with
angry, thwarted tears, is compelled to allow. From the visit
to which after leaving the Manor he had betaken himself,
he had been recalled to London with peremptory prematureness
by a telegram. A crisis in public affairs—an unlooked-for
and unpleasant turn in foreign politics has reft his chief—to
that great man's unaffected disgust—from his thymy
forest and his amethyst moor back to the barren solitudes
of Downing Street. It has kept, if not the big, at least the
lesser man bound hand and foot there until the opening of
the autumn session, which in any case, even if he had not
been defrauded of his legitimate playtime, would have
summoned him back to harness. So that Talbot sees no
red leaves except those which St. James's Park can show
him. To a country-hearted man you would think that this
would be a great privation; but this year John is glad of
it. To him the country must henceforth mean Harborough.
If he has no holiday, he need not, he cannot go to Harborough;
and in his heart he says that the loss is well
bought by the gain. It is true that Betty has, on various[Pg 182]
pretexts, run up several times to see him; that he has had
to take her to the play; to give his opinion upon her new
clothes; to sit on the old low seat beside the old sofa, in
the old obscurity of the boudoir, without the old heart.
She has even, contrary to his advice, and very much against
his wishes, insisted on coming to tea with him in his rooms
in Bury Street; and, as a matter of course, has expected
him to see her off at Paddington. But on the whole he
feels, as he speeds back in a hansom—this last duty
punctually done—drawing an unintentional sigh of relief as
he does so, that he has got through it pretty well. He has
provoked not much anger, and, thank God, no tears.
Thank God a hundred times more, too, that he has been
miraculously spared any fleers at that other woman, towards
whom, perhaps, the completeness of his lady's victory may
have rendered her magnanimous. And that other woman!
Well, he lets her image tease him as little as he can help it.
Whether that is much or little, he himself scarcely knows.
Sometimes again he does know, knows that it is infinitely
much. But that is only now and then, when some trifling
accident has given him a tiny momentary glimpse, such as
outsiders often catch, at some keen happiness à deux; some
two happy souls together blent,

'As the rose Blendeth in odour with the violet; Solution sweet.'

Then, indeed, he catches his breath with the sharpness of
the pain that runs through his lonely heart, saying to himself,
before his will can arrest and strangle the lovely,
useless thought, 'That might have been Peggy and I.'
But this, as I have said, is only now and again. As a
matter of fact, his life is too full of genuine continuous
hard work, too throbbing with great excitements, too full
of the large fever of to-day's hot politics, to have much
space for the cherishing of any merely personal ache.[Pg 183]
Sometimes for a whole day together he keeps his heart's
door triumphantly barred against her. For a day—yes;
but at night, willy-nilly, she lifts the latch, and cool and
tall walks in. In the night she has her revenge. In the
day he may think of nations clashing, of party invectives,
of discordant Cabinets, and Utopian Reforms; but at night
he thinks of Mink, and of the little finches swinging and
twittering on his ladder; of the mowing-machine's whir,
and the pallid sweet lavender bush.

As the winter nears, and such considerable and growing
portion of the world as spend some part at least of the cold
season in London, refill their houses, he goes a good deal into
society, and when there he seems to enjoy himself. How can
each woman to whom he offers his pleasant, easy civilities
know that he is saying to his own heart as he looks at her:

'Your skin is not nearly so fine grained as Peggy's;
your ear is double the size of hers; your smile comes
twice as often, but it is not nearly so worth having when it
does come'?

And so he seems to enjoy himself, and to a certain
extent really does so. It is quite possible not only to do a
great deal of good and thorough work, but to have a very
tolerable amount of real, if surface pleasure, with a dull
ache going on in the back of your heart all the time. He
has as little nourishment on which to feed his remembrance
of her as she has hers of him; nay, less, for he has about
him no persistent little Harborough voices to ask him
whether he would not like Peggy to come and live with
him always. Sometimes it strikes him with an irrational
surprise that no one should ever mention her name to him;
though a moment later reason points out to him that it
would be far more strange if they did, since her very
existence is absolutely unknown to all those who compose
his surroundings. Of no one were Wordsworth's lines ever
truer than of her:[Pg 184]

'A maid whom there were none to praise,And very few to love.'

One day he meets Freddy at Boodle's, and rushes at
him with a warmth of affectionate delight that surprises
that easy-going young gentleman. However, as Freddy is
himself always delighted to see everybody, he is delighted
to see Talbot now; and immediately gives him a perfectly
sincere, even if the next moment utterly forgotten, invitation
to spend Christmas at the Manor. He has forgotten
it, as I have said, next half-hour; he does not in the least
perceive the lameness of his friend's stuttered excuses, and
he would be thunderstruck were he to conjecture the
tempest of revolt, misery, and starved longing that his few
careless words, 'Could not you run down to us for Christmas?
no party, only ourselves and the Lambtons,' have
awoke in that unhappy friend's breast.

Christmas! yes, Christmas is drawing near—Christmas,
the great feast that looses every galley-slave from his oar.
With how sinking a heart does one galley-slave watch its
approach! How much he prefers pulling at his oar, with
all the labour and sweat it entails, to the far worse bondage
to which his emancipation from it will consign him! There
will be no shirking it this time. To all humanity Christmas
brings its three or four days of liberation; and these three
or four days he must—unless the earth open or the heaven
fall between this and then to save him—spend at Harborough.
He will have to decorate Betty's church; light
the candles on Betty's Christmas-tree; have Betty's children
hanging about his neck, and Betty's husband reproaching
him for his long absence.

Betty herself accepting his present, thanking him for it,
manœuvring to get him alone. Her present! He must be
thinking about it. He has not yet bought it. He will
have to make time to go and choose it. He yawns. When
you are in the habit of giving a person a great many[Pg 185]
presents, it is extremely difficult to vary them judiciously.
If it were a first gift now, how much simpler it would be!
Certainly quite without his consent, the thought darts
across him that he has never given Peggy a present. How
easy, how delightful, how enthralling it would be to make
her some little offering! something slight and comparatively
valueless that it would not hurt her pride to accept, but
that yet would be worth thanking him for. He feels sure
that Peggy has not received many presents in her life.
He hears her—his sweetheart—thanking him for that
ungiven, never-to-be-given fairing; and at the same moment
his eye, falling accidentally upon Betty's last letter lying
on the table before him, recalls to his mind that it is not
Margaret whom it is now a question of endowing with a
Christmas gift. His yawn is exchanged for a sigh. Poor
Betty! He undoubtedly does not grudge her her present;
but how very much it would simplify matters if she could
be induced to choose it for herself. So reflecting he takes
his hat, and repairing to the great jewellers', turns over
Hunt and Roskell's newest trinkets in dubious half-hearted
efforts at selection.

Betty is not altogether of the mind of those present-receivers
who hold that the cost of the gift is as nothing;
the giver's intention everything. Betty likes both; she
likes something rather valuable, but that yet has a sentiment
attached to it—something that tells of love, and
thought, and love's cunning.

To Talbot, a year, still more two years ago, nothing had
seemed easier than this combination. To-day, more than
two hours elapse before he can cudgel out of his dull heart
and fagged brain something that may, if not too closely
scanned, bear the semblance of a fond invention. Christmas
is now but a week off; but a week, as eager schoolboys,
and pale clerks, and worn seamstresses tell themselves.
Perhaps it may be because she knows that they will soon[Pg 186]
meet, that Betty's daily letter to Talbot has now for two
whole days been intermitted. It is a lapse that has never
before occurred, so far as he can recall, in the whole five
years of their connection; her billets appearing as regularly
as the milkman. Is it possible that she may have conceived
some occult offence against him? That he may have unwittingly
committed some mysterious sin against love's
code? This thought darts across his mind, presenting itself
first as a hope, and then as a dread. When it comes as
a hope, it suggests that in the case of her having taken
umbrage at any of his doings, or non-doings, she may show
her resentment by excluding him from her Christmas
gaieties; but this idea does not live beyond a moment. It
is not much sooner conceived than it is transmogrified into
a fear.

If they have quarrelled they will have to make it up
again. Perhaps even his laboriously chosen love-gift will
not be held a sufficient peacemaker. Perhaps he will have
to expend himself in those expletives and asseverations
that used once to come so trippingly, nay burningly, from
his tongue, but that now have to be driven by main force
from his lips, slow and cold and clogged.

A third morning has dawned. Again no letter. It is
certainly very strange.

Talbot walks to Downing Street, pondering gravely
what can be the cause of this unprecedented silence. Can
it be that she is ill? She must be ill indeed not to write
to him! A flash of distorted remorse—distorted, since it
is for being unable better to return the tenderness of
another man's wife—crosses his mind at the thought of her
great love for him. No, if she had been ill, too ill to write,
Harborough would certainly have sent him word of it,
since no one is ever half so anxious to give him tidings of
Betty, to further their meetings and impede their partings,
as Betty's worthy, blockhead husband. It is most unlikely[Pg 187]
that the post, which indeed strangely seldom misbehaves
itself, should have erred three times running.

He has reached Downing Street before any solution of
the problem has occurred to him. In the course of the
day he goes very nigh to forgetting it in the absorption of
his work. That work is, on this particular day, specially
pressing—specially monopolising. From morning to night
he has not a moment that he can call his own. He does
not even return home to dress for dinner, but snatches a
hasty mouthful of food at the House of Commons, whither
he has to accompany his chief, who is to speak on a subject
at that moment engaging both House and nation's most
passionate attention. The House is thronged to hear the
great man. He is for three hours on his legs; and his
speech is followed by a hot debate, adorned by the usual
accompaniments of senseless obstruction, indecent clamour,
and Irish Billingsgate.

It is half-past two in the morning before Talbot finds
himself turning the key in his Bury Street door. The
whole household has apparently gone to bed; but in his
sitting-room the fire has been made up. A touch of the
poker upon the coals makes them leap into a blaze, and he
sits down in an arm-chair to finish his cigar, and cast an
eye over the notes and telegrams that have come for him
during his absence. Of the former there are several; of
the latter only one. He looks at the addresses of the letters
first, to see whether any one of them may be in Lady
Betty's handwriting; but such not being the case, he
lays them down, and tears open the telegram. He does
it without any special excitement. In all our lives telegrams
are daily, in his they are half-hourly, occurrences.
But not such telegrams as this one. He has been too
lazy to light his candles; and now reads it by the firelight
that frolics redly over the thin pink paper and the clerkly
writing:[Pg 188]

'From

|

'To

Lady Betty Harborough,

|

John Talbot,

Harborough Castle,

|

Bury Street,

----shire.

|

St. James's,

|

London, W.

'Come at once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.'

When the contents of a missive that we receive, or of a
speech addressed to us, diverge very widely from anything
that we have been at all expecting, it is some time before
the meaning of the words, however simple, succeeds in
reaching our brain. Such is Talbot's case. He reads the
telegram three times before he fully grasps its signification;
and it is quite two minutes before it occurs to him
to look at its date. 'Sent out at 11.10 A.M. Received at
11.35.' It has been lying waiting for him for fourteen
hours and more. He reads it a fourth time. 'Come at
once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.'
What does it—what can it mean? To obey it now, in the
sense in which it meant to be obeyed, is as impossible as to
'call back yesterday out of the treasures of God.' It is
true that he can set off, without a moment's delay, on the
receipt of it. But as that receipt has been delayed fourteen
hours longer than its sender calculated upon, his obedience
will be a virtual disobedience. Why has she sent for him?
In any case she would have seen him in five days. What
can she have to say to him of such surpassing urgency as
cannot brook that short delay? His eye rests doubtfully
on the vague yet pressing words. In the mouth and from
the hand of any one save Betty, they would certainly imply
some grave crisis—some imminent or already fallen
catastrophe. In Betty's they may mean nothing. More
than once before, during the past five years, has she
telegraphed for him with the same indefinite peremptoriness;
and when—always at great personal inconvenience,
once gravely offending his chief, and seriously imperilling[Pg 189]
his future prospects—he has made shift to obey her
summonses, he has discovered that it had been prompted
merely by some foolish whim. Once the broken-haired
terrier, which he had given her, had had a fit; once Mr.
Harborough had spoken sharply to her before the servants;
once she had felt so low that she could not get through
the day without seeing him. These recollections combine
together to form his resolution.

He lays down the paper. He will not go. Accident
has made him disobedient; intention shall make him
further so. Had she known at what an hour her message
would reach him, even she could not have expected
compliance with it.

So thinking, his cigar being by this time finished, he
rises, and lighting his bedroom candle, turns to go to bed.
Only, just as he is leaving the room, some impulse prompts
him to read the telegram yet a fifth time. The words
have certainly not changed since he last glanced at them;
and yet they seem to him to have a more compelling look.
Why can't he force them to be more explicit? He pauses;
telegram in one hand and candle in the other. What can
she want with him? It is just within the bounds of
possibility that she may really need his presence; how or
why, he is unable to hazard the faintest conjecture. But
it is just within the limits of the possible that she may.
Various suggestions of what shape that possible may take
flit across his puzzled brain. Can it be that her husband
has at length made the discovery of what for five years
has been the open secret of all his acquaintance? In that
case, as he, Talbot, has long known—known at first with
leaping pulses, latterly with the cold sweat of an unspeakable
dread, she would not have waited for him to come to
her—she would have fled to him. It cannot, then, be that.
Various other conjectures suggest themselves, but are
dismissed as impracticable; but though they are dismissed,[Pg 190]
the fact remains that the woman to whom he once
swore—once, nay, millions of times swore a love eternal,
unalterable, exclusive—has sent him an imperative
summons to her side; and he is preparing entirely to
neglect it.

He sets down the candlestick, and takes up an 'A B C'
lying on the table, as if officiously close at hand. He will
just look to see if there is a train that would take him to
her. If there is not, that will settle the matter. He turns
to the name of the small station at which travellers to
Harborough get out. Of course not. Nothing stops at
that little wayside place before eleven o'clock. By that
time he will be installed in Downing Street for the day,
with his chief's correspondence before him.

He heaves a sigh of relief; and once more turns
bedward. But before he has reached the door another
thought has arrested him. Though there is no train which
could take him to the little station close to her gate, yet
there may easily be one which would carry him to Oxford,
only five miles away from her.

Again he picks up the 'A B C,' and runs his finger and
his eye down the page from the Paddington that heads it.
Paddington 5.30; arrives at Oxford 7.40. Yes, there is
one. It is, for the last ten miles of its course, a slow
crawler; but, if up to its time, reaches Oxford at 7.40. A
good hansom would convey him to Harborough in half an
hour. He would have twenty minutes in which to learn
her will; a second half-hour's drive would take him back
to Oxford, to catch the nine o'clock up-train, which would
land him in London in time for his day's work. It is
possible, then—quite possible. The question is, shall he
embrace that bare possibility? Shall he pick out the one
chance for, out of the ninety-nine against, there being any
real meaning in her message, to build upon it this fool's
errand. At all events, he has plenty of time in which to[Pg 191]
think it over. It is only three o'clock. There are two
good hours before he need set off.

He sits down again in his arm-chair, replenishes the fire,
and lights another cigar. A year ago he would have gone
without hesitation. Two years ago he would have stood
on his head with joy at having the chance of going; but
this year—— Well, it is true that it is no longer the voice
of the passionately loved woman calling to him—a voice
before whose sound obstacles vanish, space shrivels, time
contracts; but it may be the voice of a fellow-creature in
distress. A fellow-creature in distress! He laughs to himself
at the flat pomposity of the phrase. What kind of
distress the fellow-creature's can be—a fellow-creature so
lapped in cotton-wool, so apparently beyond the reach of
most of life's ennuis—he is absolutely at a loss to conjecture!
He spends two hours, and smokes three cigars in
conjecturing; and at the end, being as wise as he was at
the beginning, knocks up his servant, puts on his fur coat,
arms himself with as many wraps as he can muster, jumps
into a hansom, and through the murkiness—black as
midnight—of a hideous December morning, has himself
driven to the Paddington Departure Platform; where, for
three minutes, he stamps about, telling himself that no
such fool as he walks, has ever walked, or, as far as he
knows, will ever walk upon God's earth; and is then
whirled away.

CHAPTER XXI

There are not so many passengers by the 5.30 train as to
hinder its being punctual. It is almost faithful to its
minute. So far—it can't be said to be very far—fortune
favours the one of its occupants with whom we have any
concern. He rolls out, cross and furry, still repeating to
himself with an even greater intensity of inward emphasis
than he had employed at Paddington, that unflattering
opinion of his own wisdom with which he had embarked
on his present venture. If it had appeared a fool's errand
when looked forward to dispassionately from the warmth
and ease of his own fireside, what does it appear now?
Now that, having picked out the most promising-looking
of the few sleepy hansoms awaiting unlikely passengers,
and bidden the mufflered purple-nosed driver take him as
fast as his horse can lay legs to the ground to Harborough
Castle, he finds himself spinning through the Oxford
suburbs out into the flat country beyond—ugly as original
ugliness, further augmented by a December dawning and
a black and iron frost, can make it. At each mile that
carries him nearer and nearer his goal, his own unreason
looms ever immenser and yet immenser before him. By
such a gigantic folly as this even Betty herself may be
satisfied. At every echoing step the horse takes on the
frozen ground it seems to him less and less likely that
Betty has had any real reason for sending for him, any
reason that may at all account for or palliate his appearance[Pg 193]
at this unheard-of hour. Even Betty herself has asked no
such insanity of him as this. She had reckoned upon her
telegram reaching him at mid-day, and upon his arriving
in obedience to it sometime in the afternoon, an hour at
which any one may arrive at a friend's house without
provoking special comment. But now? At the spanking
pace at which, in accordance with his own directions, he is
getting over the ground, he will reach the Castle by eight
o'clock, just as the housemaids are beginning to open the
shutters and clean the grates. When the door is unbarred
to him by an astonished footman struggling into his coat,
whom shall he ask for? What shall he say? Lady Betty?
Impossible! At eight o'clock in the morning! Mr. Harborough?
Neither is he, any more than his wife, an early
riser; and if, in answer to his, Talbot's, astounding summons,
he should drag himself from his couch, and come in sleepy
déshabillé to meet him, what has he, Talbot, to say to him?
What does he want with him? How can he explain his
own appearance? Had he better ask for no one, then?—say
nothing, but just slip in, trusting to the thoroughness
of the Harborough servants' acquaintance with his appearance
to save him from any inconvenient questions? Shall
he wait in some cold sitting-room in process of dusting,
with its chairs standing on their heads, and the early
besom making play on its carpet until his half-hour is up,
and he can return whence he came, having at least done
what he was bidden to do? He laughs derisively at himself.
And meanwhile how cold he is! He has been up all night,
in itself a chilly thing; a hansom is by no means a warm
vehicle, at least to one to whom any nipping air is preferable
to having the glass let chokily down within a half-inch
of his nose. The dawn is being blown in by a small wind—small,
but full of knife-blades—and the griding frost
that holds all earth and water in the rigidity of death's
ugly sleep, has pierced into his very bones. In his life he[Pg 194]
has seldom taken a colder drive, and yet he dreads its
being over. What shall he say to Harborough? The
chance of his seeing him is indeed remote; but remote
chances do sometimes become facts. If this becomes fact,
what is he to say to him? Even through Harborough's
hippopotamus-hide there must be some arrow that will
penetrate. If anything can open the stupid eyes, so
miraculously sealed through five years, surely this insane
apparition of his will do it.

They have reached the park gates. The lodge-keeper at
least is up and dressed, and runs out with alacrity. She need
not have been in such a hurry. He would have been much
more obliged to her if she had crawled, and bungled, and
delayed him a little. Now he is rolling through the park,
by the dead white grass and the pinched brown bracken;
under the black arms of the famous chestnuts, beneath which
he and Betty have so often strayed; through half a dozen
more gates; through a last gate, on leaving which behind
them, turf more carefully trimmed, flower-beds now hard
and empty, clumps of laurustinus and rhododendron tell
of his neighbourhood to the house, which a turn in the
approach now gives to his view. His eye flies anxiously,
though with little hope, to the front. Does it look at all
awake? Are there any blinds up? It would be ludicrous
to hope that Betty's could be; Betty who is never seen a
moment before eleven o'clock, and very often not for many
moments after. He looks mechanically, though quite
hopelessly, up at her windows—the three immediately
above the portico—and so looking, starts, and gives
utterance to an involuntary ejaculation. In the case of all
three, shutters are open and blinds up. What can have
happened? What can so flagrant a departure from the
habits of a lifetime imply? He has reached the door by
now, and, jumping out, rings the bell. He will probably
have long to wait before it is answered, the servants,[Pg 195]
expecting no such summons, being probably dispersed to
other quarters of the house. But, as in the case of the
lodge-keeper, he is mistaken.

With scarce any delay the great folding-doors roll back;
nor is there in the faces of the couple of footmen who
appear any of that blank astonishment which he had been
schooling himself to meet. There is no surprise that he
can detect upon their civil features, any more than there
would have been had he and his portmanteau walked in at
five o'clock in the afternoon.

'Of—of course no one is up yet?' he says, with an air
that he, as he feels, in vain tries to make easy and disengaged.

'Oh yes, sir; her ladyship is up! Her ladyship has
been up all night.'

Up all night! Then some one must be ill! Is it
Harborough? Harborough ill? Will he die? In one
thought-flash these questions, with all that for him and his
future life an answer in the affirmative would imply, dart
through his mind—dart with such a sickening dread that
he can scarcely frame his next and most obvious question.

'Is any one ill, then?'

For the first time the servant looks a little surprised.
If it is not on account of the illness in the house why has
Mr. Talbot presented himself at this extraordinary hour?

'Yes, sir; Master Harborough has been very ill for two
days. Sir Andrew Clark and Dr. Ridge Jones came down
yesterday to see him, and he was hardly expected to live
through the night.'

Master Harborough! Not expected to live through the
night! At this news, so entirely unlooked for—since,
amongst all the possibilities whose faces he has been scanning,
that of something having happened to the children has never
once presented itself—Talbot stands stock-still, rooted to
the spot, in sad amazement. Poor little Master Harborough![Pg 196]
In a moment he is seeing him again as he had last seen him—seen
the little sturdy figure that, in its rosy vigour,
seemed to be shaking its small fist in defiance at age, or
decay, or death. Yes; he sees him again—sees, too, his
mother, laughing at his naughtiness, bragging of his strength,
smothering him with her kisses. Poor, poor Betty! A
great rush of compassionate tenderness floods his heart
towards the woman against whom he had just been harshly
shutting that heart's doors; discrediting her truth; grudging
the service she has asked of him; crediting her even in his
thoughts with the indecency of summoning him to her
husband's death-bed. Oh, poor Betty! On his heart's
knees he begs her pardon.

His agitation is so great and so overcoming that, for the
moment, he can ask no more questions, but only follows
the butler, who by this time has appeared on the scene, in
silent compliance with his request to him to come upstairs—a
request accompanied by the remark that he will let her
ladyship know that he is here. Having led him to Betty's
boudoir, the servant leaves him to look round, with what
heart he may, on all the objects of that most familiar scene.
How familiar they are—all her toys and gewgaws! Many
he himself has given her; some they had chosen together;
over others they had quarrelled; over others, again, they
had made up—but how well he knows them, one and all!
He looks round on them with a triple sorrow—the sorrow
of his past love and present pity for her joining hands, in
melancholy triad, with his deep and abiding self-contempt.
He looks round on the countless fans—fans everywhere—open,
half-open; on the great Japanese umbrella, stuck up,
in compliance with one of the most senseless fashions ever
introduced, in the middle of the room, with Liberty silk
handkerchiefs meaninglessly draped about its stem; on the
jumping frogs and mechanical mice; on the banjo she has
often thrummed to him; on the mandoline she has tried to[Pg 197]
wheedle him into learning to play, that he may sing her
Creole love-songs to it.

He turns away from them all with a sick impatient sigh.
How hideously out of tune they and all the fooleries they
recall seem with this soul-and-body-biting December dawning—with
'Master Harborough not expected to live through
the night!'

He has never seen Betty in the grasp of a great grief.
He is as much at a loss to picture how she will bear it as
he would be to fancy a butterfly drawing a load of coals.
How will she take it? How will she look? What shall
he say? How shall he comfort her? That she has had
any other motive in sending for him than the child's impulse
to show the cut finger or the barked shin to a friend never
occurs to him. His poor Betty! No selfish regret enters
his mind at having been summoned through the midwinter
night helplessly to see a little child die. He can think of
nothing but how best to console her. He is very far from
being ready with any consolations that even to himself
appear at all consoling, when the door opens, and she enters.

At the sound of the turning handle he has gone to meet
her, with both hands out as if to draw her and her misery
to that breast whose doors are thrown wider to her than
they have been for many months; but no answering hands
come to meet them. Some gesture of hers tells him that
she does not wish him to approach her.

'How late you are!' she says.

If he were not looking at her, and did not see with his
own eyes that the words proceeded out of her mouth, he
would never have recognised her voice. By that voice, and
by her whole appearance, he is so shocked, that for a
moment he cannot answer. Even upon the face of a girl
in the first flush of youth, and whose only ornamentings
come from the Hand of God, two long nights' vigils, extravagant
weeping, the careless dishevelment of heart-rending[Pg 198]
anguish, write themselves in terrible characters. What,
then, must they do to a woman like Betty, whose whole
beauty is a carefully built-up fabric, on which no sun must
look, and no zephyr blow too inquisitively?

For the first time in his life Talbot fully realises what a
built-up fabric it is. Through his mind flashes the doubt,
whether, if without expecting to meet her, he had come
across her in the street, he should have recognised her.
She looks fifty years old. Her hair is in damp disorder;
at the top all rough and disturbed, where it has evidently
been desperately buried in a little counterpane. She is not
now crying; but her unnumbered past tears have partially
washed the rouge off her cheeks. A dreadful impression of
the ludicrous, inextricably entangled with his unspeakable
compassion—an impression for which he tells himself that
he ought to be flayed alive—conveys itself to Talbot from
her whole appearance. But though he ought to be flayed
alive for receiving it, still it is there. And meanwhile she
has spoken to him a second time. He must say something
to her; not stand staring with stupid cruelty at her in her
ruin and abasement.

'I expected you all yesterday,' she says in that same
strange, dreadful voice.

He gives a sort of gasp. Can that indeed be the voice
whose pretty treble has so often run with rippling laughter
into his ears? the voice that sang him comic songs to that
very banjo—now lying in its irony beside him—almost the
last time that he heard its tones? His head is in a grisly
whirl between that Betty and this. Which is the true one?
Is this only a hideous nightmare? It seems at least to have
the suffocating force of one; a force through which it is
only by the strongest self-compulsion that he can break to
answer her.

'I came as soon as I got your telegram.'

Her eyes, washed away to scarcely more than half their[Pg 199]
size, are resting upon him; and yet it seems by her next
speech as if she had either not heard or not heeded his
answer.

'You might have come quicker,' she says.

'But indeed I could not,' cries he, genuine distress
lending him at last fluent speech. 'I was at the House
till two in the morning; I never received it until I got
home to Bury Street; I came by the very next train. Oh,
Betty, how could you doubt that I should?'

As he speaks an arrow of self-reproach shoots through
his heart at the thought of how near a chance the poor
soul's cry for help had run of being altogether disregarded.

'I wanted to speak to you,' she says, a spark of fever
brightening the chill wretchedness of her look. 'I have
something to say to you; that was why I sent for you.'

'Of course, of course!' he answers soothingly. 'I was
delighted to come.'

'I can't stay more than a minute,' she says restlessly.
'I must go back to him; I have never left him for eight
and forty hours. He is asleep now—only under opiates—but
an opiate sleep is better than none, is it not?' consulting
his face with a piteous appeal.

'Much—much better,' replies Talbot earnestly.

'You have heard—they have told you—how ill he is?'

A sort of hard break makes itself heard in her voice;
but she masters it impatiently.

'Yes, they have told me.'

'What have they told you?' asks she sharply. 'I daresay
that they have told you a great deal more than the
truth. If they have told you that there is no hope, they
have told you wrong. They had no right to say so; there
is hope!'

'They never told me that there was not,' replies he, still
more soothingly than before; for it seems to him that no
finger can be laid too gently on that terrible mother-ache.[Pg 200]

'It all came so suddenly,' says she, putting her hand up
with a bewildered air to her damp forehead and disordered
hair. 'And yet now it seems centuries since he was running
about. How he ran and jumped, did not he? There never
was such an active child. And now it seems centuries that
he has been lying in his little bed.'

For a moment she breaks down entirely, but fights her
way on again.

'It was only a cold at first—quite a slight cold! He
was not the least ill with it, and I thought nothing of it;
and then on Tuesday there came an acrobatic company to
Darnton'—the little neighbouring market-town—'and he
was so excited about them, and begged so hard to be allowed
to go and see them, that I took him; and he was so delighted
with them—he clapped and applauded more than anybody in
the house; and all the evening afterwards he was trying to do
the things he had seen them do—you know how clever he
always is in imitating people—and telling nurse about them.
Nurse and I agreed that we had never seen him in such
spirits. But he did not sleep well; he was always dreaming
about them, and jumping up; and next morning he
was in a high fever, and I sent for the doctor, and he has
been getting worse ever since; and now——'

Again she breaks down, but again recovering herself,
goes on rapidly:

'But it is not the same as if it were a grown-up person,
is it? Children have such wonderful recovering power,
have not they?—down one day and up the next. They
pull through things that would kill you or me, do not
they? He will pull through, won't he? You think that
he will pull through?'

'I am sure that he will,' replies Talbot earnestly.

It is, of course, an answer absolutely senseless, and in
the air; but what other can he give, with those miserable
eyes fastened in such desperate asking upon his?[Pg 201]

'Oh, if you knew what it has been,' she says, her arms
falling with a gesture of measureless tired woe to her sides
as she speaks, 'to have been kneeling by him all these two
days, hearing him moan, and seeing him try to get his
breath!—he does not understand what it means; he has
never been ill before. He thinks that I can help him. O
God! he thinks I can help him, and that I don't! He
turns to me for everything. You know that he always did
when he was well, did not he? He is always asking me
when the pain will go away? Asking me whether he has
been naughty, and I am angry with him? Angry with
him! I angry with him! O God! O God!'

Her excitement and her grief have been gaining upon
her at each fresh clause of her speech, and at the end she
flings herself down on the ground and buries her face in
the cushion of a low chair, while dry, hard sobs shake her
from head to foot.

What is he to say to her? Nothing. He will not insult
such a sorrow by the futility of his wretched words. He can
only stoop over her, and lay his hand no harshlier than her
mother would have done, no harshlier than she herself would
have laid hers upon her little dying boy, on her heaving
shoulder. But she shakes off his light touch, and raising her
distorted face, again tries to address him. But the rending
sobs that still convulse her make her utterance difficult; and
her words, when they come, scarcely intelligible.

'Do not touch me! leave me—leave me—alone! I—I
have not yet said what—what I had to say to you. That—that
was not what I had to say to you! I—I—must say
what I—sent for you—to say.'

She pauses, gasping. It seems as if the task she had set
herself was beyond her present strength.

'Do not tell me,' he says most gently; 'if it is anything
that hurts you, do not tell me now; wait and tell me
by and by.'[Pg 202]

He has withdrawn at her bidding his hand from her
shoulder, but has knelt down in his deep pity beside her,
and tried to take in his her cold and clammy fingers. But
she draws them sharply away.

'Did not I tell you to leave me alone!' she cries
in a thin voice. 'Let me—let me say what I have to
say to you, and have done with it. I will say it now!
I must say it now! What business have you,' turning
with a pitiful fierceness upon him, 'to try and hinder
me?'

'I do not—I do not!' speaking in the tenderest tone.
'Tell it me of course, whatever it is, if it will give you the
least relief.'

'I sent for you to tell you that it is all over—all over
between us,' she says, having now mastered her sobs, and
speaking with great rapidity and distinctness; 'that is
what I sent for you to tell you. I wanted you to come at
once, that I might tell you. Why did not you come at
once? I have been a very wicked woman——'

'No, dear, no! indeed you have not!' he interrupts
with an accent of excessive pain and protest.

But she goes on without heeding him:

'Or if I have not, it has been no thanks to me; it has
been thanks to you, who have saved me from myself!
But whatever there has been between us, it is over now.
That is what I sent for you to tell you. Over! do you
understand? Gone! done with! Do you understand?
Why do not you say something? Do you hear? Do you
understand?'

'I hear,' he answers in a mazed voice; 'but I—I
do not understand! I do not understand why, if you
want to tell me this, you should tell it me now of all
times.'

'It is now of all times that I want to tell you—that I
must tell you!' cries she wildly. 'Cannot you see that it[Pg 203]
is on account of him? Oh, cannot you think what it has
been kneeling beside him with his little hot hand in mine!
You do not know how fiery hot his hand is! Last night
his pulse was so quick that the doctor could scarcely count
the beats—it was up to 120; and while I was kneeling
beside him the thought came to me that perhaps this had
happened to him on—on—account of—us! that it was a
judgment on me!'

She pauses for a minute, and he tries to put in some
soothing suggestion, but she goes on without heeding
him.

'You may call it superstition if you please, but it came
to me—oh, it seems years ago now!—it must have been
the night before last!—and as the night went on, it kept
getting worse and worse, as he got worse and worse; and
in the morning I could not bear it any longer, and I sent
for you! I thought that you would have been here in a
couple of hours.'

'So I would! So I would! Heaven knows so I would,
if it had been possible!'

'And all yesterday he went on growing worse—I did
not think that he could have been worse than he was in
the night, and live—but he was. All day and all last
night again he was struggling for breath!—think of
having to sit by and see a little child struggling for his
breath!'

She stops, convulsed anew by that terrible dry sobbing,
that is so much more full of anguish than any tears.

'Poor little chap! poor Betty!'

'I have been listening all night for you! I could not
have believed that you would have been so long in coming;
it is such a little way off! I knew—I had a feeling that he
would never get better until you had come—until I had
told you that it was all over between us; but I have told
you now, have not I? I have done all that I could! One[Pg 204]
cannot recall the past; no one can, not even God! He
cannot expect that of me; but I have done what I could—all
that is left me to do, have not I?'

There is such a growing wildness in both her eye and
voice that he does not know in what terms to answer her;
and can only still kneel beside her, in silent, pitying
distress.

'I see that you think I am out of my wits!' she says,
looking distrustfully at him; 'that I must be out of my
wits to talk of sending you away—you who have been
everything to me. Cannot you see that it is because I
love you that I am sending you away? if I did not love
you it would be nothing—no sacrifice!—it would be no
use! But perhaps if I give up everything—everything I
have in the world except him' (stretching out her hands,
with a despairing gesture of pushing from herself every
earthly good)—'perhaps then—then—God will spare him
to me! perhaps He will not take him from me! It may
be no good! He may take him all the same; but there is
just the chance! say that you think it is a chance!'

But he cannot say so. There are very few words that
he would not try to compel his lips to utter; but he dares
not buoy her up with the hope that she can buy back her
child by a frantic compact with the Most High. Her eyes
drop despairingly from his face, not gaining the assent
they have so agonisedly asked for; and she struggles
dizzily to her feet.

'That is all—I had—to—tell you!' she says fiercely.
'I have nothing more to say!—nothing that need—need
detain you here any longer. I must go back to him; he
may be asking for me!—asking for me, and I not there!
But you understand—you are sure that you understand?
I have often sent you away before in joke, but I am not
joking now' (poor soul! that, at least, is a needless assertion);
'I am in real earnest this time! I am not sending[Pg 205]
you away to-day only to send for you back again to-morrow;
it is real earnest this time; it is for ever!—do you understand?
For ever! say it after me, that I may be sure that
you are making no mistake—for ever.'

And he, looking down into the agony of her sunk eyes,
not permitted even to touch in farewell her clammy hand,
echoes under his breath, 'For ever!'

CHAPTER XXII

'Das Herz wuchs ihm so sehnsuchtsvollWie bei der Lichsten Gruss.'

For ever! All through the wintry day they hammer at
his ears—those two small words that take up such a little
space on a page, and yet cover eternity. There is nothing
that does not say them to him. The hansom horse's four
hoofs beat them out upon the iron-bound road; the locomotive
snorts them at him; the dry winter wind sings
them in his ears; Piccadilly's roar, and the tick of the
clock on the chimney-piece of the room where he works
in Downing Street, equally take their shape to him. For
ever! They must always be solemn words, even though
in the slackness of our loose vocabulary they are often
fitted to periods no longer than ten minutes, than an hour,
than six months. But one never quite forgets that they
can stretch to the dimensions of the great sea that washes
Time's little shores. For ever! At each point of his return
journey there recurs to him the memory of some unkind
thought that he had had of her on his way down. Here
he had accused her of some paltry motive in sending for
him! There he had protested against the dominion of her
whims. Here again, he had groaned under the thought of
having, within five days, to pass a second time this way in
order to spend his compulsory Christmas with her.

Well, that Christmas is no longer compulsory—no longer
possible even. He has his will. He may keep for himself[Pg 207]
that present which he had so grudged the trouble of
choosing for her. For ever! Those two words are the
doors that shut away into the irredeemable past that
portion of his life in which she has shared. Only five years
after all! He need not have grudged her only five years.

An intense and cutting remorse for the bitterness of his
late thoughts of her; for his impatience of her fond yoke;
for his weariness of her company, and passionate eagerness
to escape from her, travels every step of the way with him
as he goes. Well, he may be pleased now. He has his
wish. He has escaped from her. But has he escaped?
Can that be called escape, not for one moment of that
day, or any succeeding days, to get the bottomless wretchedness
of those poor eyes, the pathos of those sunk and
ghastly cheeks, and of that damp ruffled hair from before
his own vision; never for one instant of the whole noisy
day to have his ears free from the sound of that thin,
harsh mother-voice, asking him whether her boy will live?
Between him and the paper on which he writes that face
comes. It rises between him and the speakers in the
House. It closes his eyes at night. It figures with added
distortion in his dreams. It comes with the dull dawn to
wake him. He spends his Christmas alone with it in
London. To do so seems to him, in his remorse, some
slight expiation of the unlovingness of his late past thoughts
towards her. He would deem it a crime to join any happy
Christmas party while she is kneeling with that face
beside her dying child. Since he cannot go to her, he will
go nowhere.

Once indeed—nay, to tell truth, twice, thrice, the
thought has recurred to him of Freddy Ducane's affectionate
invitation to the Manor, and that there is now nothing—no
pre-engagement to hinder him from accepting it. But
each time he dismisses the idea, as if it had been a suggestion
of Satan. Scarcely less ruthlessly does he put to[Pg 208]
flight a face that, as the days go by, will come stealing in front
of the other; a face that—albeit modest—is pertinacious too;
since, despite his routings, it comes back and back again.
And meanwhile he hears no news from Harborough. To
telegraph inquiries would seem to him a contravention of
her will—hers, who has so passionately decided that their
paths are henceforth to diverge. But he anxiously and
daily searches the obituary for that name he dreads to find;
looks anxiously, too, about the streets and round his clubs
in search of some common acquaintance—some country
neighbour—to whom he may apply with probability of
success for tidings of the child. But for some days he
looks in vain. London has emptied itself for the Christmas
holidays, and it appears to him as if he were the only
one of his acquaintance left in it. That the boy is still
fighting for his life is proved by the fact of his name not
having been entered in the list of deaths. Still fighting!
He still panting, and she still kneeling beside him! It
makes Talbot draw his own breath gaspingly to think of it.

As the days go on, his anxiety to get news—any news,
whether it may be bad or good—of how that drama being
played out on the narrow stage of a little bed, and the one
act of which that he has seen haunts him with such a persistency
of torment, grows more urgent and intense.
London has filled again. The Christmas holiday week is
over, and humanity's innumerable beasts of burden have
returned to their yokes. The frost still continues, and the
clubs are nearly as crowded as in June; crowded with
every one whom he does not wish to see; empty of any one
that he seeks. Hitherto, as long as he has had no desire
for their company—has avoided it rather, from the associations
it has had with his own entanglement—he has met
acquaintances made at Harborough, people living in the
neighbourhood of Harborough, friends of the Harboroughs,
at every turn. They have claimed his acquaintance; have[Pg 209]
insisted on greeting him; on forcing upon him pieces of local
information which have no manner of interest for him.
Now, however, that they might do him a substantial
service; now that they might, nay, must, give him the
tidings he is craving for, all such persons appear to have
been swept from the face of the earth. Look as he may,
in club, and street, and private house, he can find none.

One Sunday afternoon, a cold and ugly Sunday, he is
walking down St. James's Street, turning over in his mind
how best to obtain some certainty as to that subject, his
miserable uncertainty upon which is desolating his life,
when in one of the numberless passing hansoms his eye
suddenly alights upon a surely very well-known profile. If
it is not the profile of Betty's husband, he is deceived by
the most extraordinary accidental likeness that ever beguiled
human sight. Harborough is in London, then? What
does that mean? Does it mean that the boy is better? or
does it mean that it is all over? A spasm of pain contracts
his heart. Poor little chap! Perhaps his father's presence
here only means that he is already hidden away in the
grave, and that there is nothing left for father-love, or
mother-love either, to do for him.

Talbot's eye has eagerly singled out the hansom, and
followed it. Happily for him, it stops at not a hundred
yards' distance from him, at the St. James's Club, and a
figure—indubitably Mr. Harborough's—jumps out. Talbot
hastens after him. It is a club to which he himself belongs,
and he enters it not a minute after the object of his pursuit.
Some irrational fear that that object may even yet evade
him—that he may be even yet balked of that news for
which he seems to have been months, years, thirstily waiting,
lends wings to his feet. He is so close upon his
friend's heels that the latter has not had time to get
beyond the hall. One lightning-glance tells Talbot that he
looks much as usual; that there is no crape on his hat;[Pg 210]
and that his insignificant face is as innocent of any expression
beyond its ordinary banal good humour as he has ever
seen it. Then the child is not dead! That little jolly
face that has been so often pressed against his own is not
companioned with the dust. Thank God for that! But
his one minute's look, though unspeakably reassuring, has
not yet so entirely banished his fears that he can delay for
one instant putting the question which has been for ten
weary days on his lips, unable to be asked.

'The boy? How is the boy?'

Mr. Harborough starts.

'Hullo! it is you, is it? delighted to see you!' shaking
his hand with the same prolonged and mistaken warmth
under which Talbot has so often writhed.

He does not writhe now. He repeats his eager
question:

'How is the boy?'

'Oh! you have heard of our trouble about him?'
returns Harborough cheerfully. 'Well, to tell truth, the
young beggar did give us a fright! but he is as right as a
trivet again now, or at least he is on the high road to be
so; but he had a near shave of it, poor little man! not one
of us thought he would pull through. Andrew Clark
himself did not. We all of us—his mother, I, everybody—thought
he was going to give us the slip; but not a bit
of it. I never saw such a boy! There he is, shouting and
kicking up such a row, they can scarcely keep him in bed;
and eat—he would eat an old shoe—he would eat you or
me if we gave him the chance.'

He ends with a jovial, if not very wise, laugh; but
Talbot does not echo it, though Heaven knows that he is
glad enough at heart for any expression of mirth.

'You must run down and see him,' pursues the other
hospitably; 'it is a long time since you have paid us a visit.
Come now, fix a day; there is no time like the present.'[Pg 211]
'You forget,' replies Talbot, with an embarrassment
which, however, is not perceived by his interlocutor, 'that
I am not one of those lucky fellows like you whose time is
their own. I cannot take a holiday whenever I choose;
you must remember that mine is just over.'

'Stuff and nonsense!' rejoins Betty's husband, with
rough good humour. 'Do not tell me that they keep you
as tight as that! I know better! I will take no excuses;
only two days ago Betty was saying to me what an age it
was since we had seen anything of you.'

Before he can hinder it, Talbot's jaw drops. Betty had
said so? Betty? Has sorrow then robbed her of her wits?

'By the bye,' continues Harborough, correcting himself,
and happily ignorant of the effect produced by his last
words, 'it was the other way up; it was I who said so to
her. But it is all the same thing; she will be delighted to
see you. She will never forgive me if I let you escape us
this time; and the boy, you positively must come and help
us to keep that boy in order. I never saw such a boy!'
(beginning again to chuckle).

It is not without very considerable difficulty, not without
some sacrifice of truth, some vague promises, that Talbot
at length succeeds in making his escape without having
tied himself down to any special day for making his appearance
at that house from whose doors the wife has warned
him off with as great an eagerness as—it cannot be greater
than—the husband now shows to force him into them.
As long as he is in Harborough's company, the necessity
for baffling his friend's stupid urgencies, the awkwardness
of rebutting civilities so well meant, prevent him from
realising the full intensity of his relief. But when he has
reached his own rooms, when he is alone, then indeed he
knows the weight of the burden that has rolled from his
shoulders. The boy is not dead; riotously alive rather.
Thank God—thank God for that! And she is no longer[Pg 212]
kneeling beside him, no longer out of breath for company.
He may drive away for ever from before his eyes that
hideous vision of her as he had last seen her, and which
has been for fourteen days poisoning sleep and waking for
him. He may drive it away; and not only so, but he may
replace it by any other vision he chooses. Any other! In
the first stupefaction of that thought—for joy has her
stupefaction as well as pain—he covers his face with both
hands, as if, by shutting out all other objects, he could the
better bring that astounding change home to his mazed
brain and his leaping heart. He is free! He has to say
the word over many, many times to himself before he can
at all take in its full significance. He is free!—free, too,
with a freedom that has been given to him, that has been
gained by no violent bursting of bars, and which therefore
he may taste with that fulness of joy that those alone can
feel who have long lain fast bound in misery and iron. He
has been so long a bondman, the irons have cut so deeply
into his flesh, that on first coming out into God's good light
he staggers blindly as one drunk.

He walks to the window and looks out. The bells are
ringing to afternoon church, and the congregations are
passing staidly by. He looks out at them all, with a joyous
smile at the endimanché shop-boys, each with his sweetheart
on his arm; at the little children holding fathers' and
mothers' hands. He, too, may have a sweetheart. He,
too, may be blessed with little children. There are none
of the possibilities which make life lovely to other men, to
which he, too, may not aspire. The happy tears crowd
into his eyes.

From the window he walks to his bureau, and out of a
secret drawer takes a tiny tissue-paper parcel, and from it
carefully extracts its contents. They consist of only one
sprig of dried lavender, thieved from the garden of the
little Red House, and at which for five months he has not[Pg 213]
dared to look. He may look at it now; may pass it
lovingly across his lips; may inhale whatever yet lingers
of its innocent cottage sweetness. There is enough still
left to recall the parent-tree. He may see again that
spreading flowered bush; may see again Minky galloping
like a little gray whirlwind across the lawn; may hear
again the parrot swearing in the cook's voice, and sleepily
clacking with his black tongue in the sunshine; may watch
the eleven birds—are there still eleven, he wonders?—hopping
and quarrelling and twittering up and down upon
his ladder; may see Jacob and the mowing-machine; and—her.
Can any bodily eyes show her to him much more
plainly than his spirit's eyes see her now, summoned up
before him by that delicate, homely perfume, that is to him
so indissolubly associated with her?—see her as he saw her
last in the walled Manor garden, standing among the moon-shimmering
white gladioli, and saying to him with farewell
smile and wavering voice:

'Since you are so determined to go downhill, I suppose
I dare not say that I hope our paths will ever meet again.'

But now—but now! God knows how he has long hated
his downhill course; and now—and now there is no reason,
none in heaven above or earth beneath, why their paths
should not for ever merge. His head sinks forward on his
clasped hands, still jealously clasped upon the lavender
sprig, and his hot tears rain on its little dry buds. In his
whole life before he has never cried for joy. At night he
cannot sleep for that same troublesome joy; but, indeed,
he would grudge any slumber that robbed him for even a
moment of the consciousness of his blessedness. He feels
no need of that lost sleep all next day as he walks, treading
on air, through the murky London streets, that seem to
him gold-paved, diamond-shining. He knows that he
must look senselessly radiant; for, in the course of the
day, several people of his acquaintance meeting him ask[Pg 214]
what he is smiling at. One inquires whether some one has
left him a fortune. Before he can stop himself, he has
almost answered, 'Yes.' Is not it true—most true? His
state of exaltation lasts, with no perceptible lessening,
through all that day, through the night—almost as sleepless
as the preceding one—that follows it; but on the succeeding
morning there comes a check, a very slight one, but still a
check to the triumphal course of his felicity. Amongst
that morning's letters is one which, at the first glance, he
imagines to be from Betty; and though a second look
reassures him on this point, and though, on opening it, it
proves to be merely an invitation to dinner from a slight
acquaintance, yet the train of thought induced by the shock
of that first impression successfully pulls him down from
his empyrean. What security has he that Betty may not
write to him; that now that her terror and her grief are
alike past, she may not deride as superstition the conduct
dictated by that grief, and, like a child, ask to have back
again her given and repented gift? What security has he—a
cold sweat breaks out on his forehead at the thought—that
any day, on his return from his work, he may not find
her standing by the fire, ready to throw herself into his
arms, and tell him with sobs that she cannot bear her life
without him, and that they must take up again the old
relations? And if she does so—there is such a horrible
probability in the idea, that it is as well to face it—what
answer is he to make her? Would it be chivalrous, loyal,
to take her at that word wrung from her anguish, wrung
from her when she was no more her real self than if she
had been raving in a fit of madness? To make her keep
to it, when with tears and prayers she is begging him to
let her resume it? And if not, if not—with what a heart-sinking
does he face the suggestion—must he again bow
his neck to the yoke? Must he again put on his gyves?
God save him from that hard alternative![Pg 215]

And so, in the fear of it, he goes day and night. For
weeks it takes the edge off his bliss; for weeks he never
glances at the addresses of his letters without a pang of
dread; for weeks he never turns the handle of his door
on his return home from his work without a shiver of
apprehension. But not once does his eye alight on that
feared handwriting; always his room is empty of that once
so longed-for, and now dreaded presence. Ah, he is not
so indispensable to her as he had fancied! She can do
better without him than in his self-value had appeared
possible. He need not be afraid that her fingers will ever
again trace his name upon paper, or hurriedly lift his
latch. As he realises this, so unaccountable is human
nature, a slight pang of irrational regret mingles with the
profundity of his relief and joy. But as the days, lengthening
and brightening in their advance toward spring, go
by, the pang vanishes as the fear had done; only yet more
quickly, and his visions possess him wholly. When—when
may he make them realities? How soon, without appearing
brutally unfeeling towards, prematurely forgetful of,
his old sweetheart, may he take his new one by her white
hand under the Judas-tree, saying, in the lovely common
words that all the world uses and none can improve upon,
merely, 'I love you'?

CHAPTER XXIII

No one can be in profounder ignorance than is Peggy of
the fact of any one breathing passionate sighs towards her
from Downing Street. The only news that she has heard
of John Talbot is a casual mention by Freddy of the fact
of his having invited him to spend his Christmas at the
Manor, and of his having refused without giving any
particular reason.

'He does not care for our simple pleasures, I suppose,'
says Freddy, with a smile; 'and, on the whole, I am not
sorry. He is a good fellow; but we are really much more
comfortable by ourselves. I like to have you two dear
things all to myself.'

As he speaks he extends a hand apiece impartially to
his betrothed and her sister. Peggy is in these days in
possession of one of Freddy's hands oftener than she
altogether cares about; but, since he is always reminding
her that he is now a more than brother to her—in fact,
as he has long been in feeling—she decides that it is not
worth making a fuss about, and lets her cool and careless
fingers lie in that fraternal hand without paying any attention
to it. For her the winter has passed tant bien que mal.
Christmas had brought her love to Prue, and the mumps
to the Evanses; and both events have supplied Peggy
with plenty of work.

The Evanses are one of those families who have all
their diseases bountifully. Their very mumps are severe[Pg 217]
and simultaneous. They all have them—father, mother,
schoolboys, old baby, new baby. A hireling tells the
Christmas news from Mr. Evans's pulpit, while Mr. Evans
sits in his study, with the door locked to hinder the intrusion
of his suffering progeny, stooping his swelled
features over his Earthly Paradise, and thinking with
envy and admiration of the institution of a celibate clergy.
Both babies bawl from morning to night at this practical
joke played upon them by Providence at the outset of
their career; and the boys wistfully press their enlarged
faces—unnecessarily enlarged, since they were large before—against
the frozen panes of the Vicarage windows, in
futile longing for the unattainable joys held out to them
by the view of the iron-bound Vicarage pond, and the
glassy slideableness of the turnpike road.

The calamity to her clergy has thrown the conduct of
the whole of the parish charities and gaieties on Peggy's
hands. Nor is she without a little nursing on her own
account; for Freddy, by dint of keeping his Prue out on
the leads till ten o'clock at night, talking to her about
himself and the fixed stars, has succeeded in giving her
such a cold on the chest, that neither can she hear the
Christmas tidings. However, he is so touchingly repentant
for what he has done, says such cutting things about
himself, and sits by her side so devotedly for hours,
reading poetry to her in a charming sympathetic voice,
that nobody can be seriously angry with him—least of all
Prue, whose one heart-felt prayer is that her cold may
become chronic, or that at least she may have a new one
every month.

'He has been reading me such beautiful poetry!' she
says in a soft voice one day, when Peggy rejoins her after
her lover has taken his daily departure. 'Very deep, you
know; so that one had to put one's whole mind to following
it. But beautiful, too—like Browning, only better?'[Pg 218]

Peggy lifts her eyebrows.

'Like Browning, only better!'

'And when I said so,' pursues Prue, with hot cheeks
and bright proud eyes, 'he told me that he never knew
any one who had such an unerring instinct for what was
good in literature as I.'

'And whose was it?' inquires Margaret, a little suspiciously.

'He would not tell me. I could not get him to tell
me; but I think—oh, Peggy, I cannot help fancying that
it was his own!'

'That would account for his looking upon your instinct
as unerring, would not it?' retorts Peggy, laughing.

But she does not always laugh over Freddy and Prue.
Though young Ducane repeats to her oftener than once or
twice a day that he is now her more than brother, in fact
as well as in feeling, he does not tell any one else so. Despite
all Peggy's representations, entreaties, protests, he
has not yet given the slightest hint of his new situation to
his aunt.

'I must insist upon your telling her,' Peggy has said.
'As things now stand, I cannot bear to meet her; I feel
an impostor and a cheat. It is putting us all in such a
false position; it makes me miserable to think that she
has not a suspicion that the old conditions are not quite
unaltered.'

'Poor old conditions!' says Freddy dreamily, leaning
with thrown-back head in the rocking-chair, and staring up
at the ceiling, as in the summer he used to stare up at the
sky and the jackdaws. 'It is a sad thought that one never
can gain anything in this world without some counterbalancing
loss! Life is a sort of compromise; is not it,
Peg?'

'If you do not tell her, I warn you that I shall tell her
myself.'[Pg 219]

Her tone is so resolute that Freddy forsakes his pensive
generalities, and sits up.

'I am sorry once again, my Peggy, to have to remind
you of that well-known firm who realised a large fortune
by minding their own business.'

'It is my own business,' retorts Peggy firmly, though
her cheek burns, 'it is Prue's business; and Prue's business
is mine. If you do not tell milady, I repeat that I shall
tell her myself.'

'I daresay you will,' replies Freddy sadly; 'and if you
do, you will give a great deal of pain to a person who has
never wittingly given you anything but pleasure in all her
life.'

'Why should I give her pain?' returns Margaret, rising
in high excitement from her chair, and standing before the
fire, with quivering nostril and flashing eye. 'What is
there to give her pain in——'

'It would give her pain, acute pain, to hear such a piece
of news from any one but myself,' answers Freddy, with the
same air of subdued sadness.

'Then why do not you tell her?' persists Margaret.

For all answer he rises too, and tries, unsuccessfully this
time, to put his brotherly arm about her waist. 'Wait till
I have got through my schools,' he says in a melting
whisper; 'wait till I have taken my degree. When I have
taken my degree she can no longer look upon me as a child,
bless her old heart!'

'I see no signs of her looking upon you as a child now.'

'Oh, but she does,' replies Freddy confidently; 'to her'
(beginning to laugh) 'I am still the lisping little innocent
whom she took to her arms eighteen years ago.' Then,
growing grave again, 'I do not think that you quite understand
how difficult it is for an old person to realise that we
are grown up; as I have told you several times, I find it
difficult to realise it myself. Do not you too? No? Well,[Pg 220]
dear, because you are strong yourself do not be harsh to
weaker vessels; but,' sinking his voice to a coaxing whisper,
'be the dear thing I have always found you, and wait till
I have taken my degree.'

She has not the slightest ambition to be the 'dear thing
he has always found her;' and his beguilements would
have been absolutely wasted upon her, nor served to turn
her by one hair's breadth from her purpose, had not they
been so strenuously backed up by Prue.

'Oh, Peggy, for pity's sake do not interfere!' she has
implored, with eyes full of tears and an agonised voice.
'Leave it all to him. He has such exquisite tact that he is
sure to choose the best moment for telling her; and if you
told her, and anything disagreeable came of it, it might give
him a turn against me. He is so finely strung—he knows it
himself, and looks upon it as quite a misfortune; the other
day he asked me if I thought there was any use in his
trying to change it—so finely strung that he cannot bear a
contact with anything harsh or violent; and, as he often
says, our love now is like a poem; and he thinks that anything
that seemed to vulgarise it, or pull it down to a
common level, would kill him.'

'Very well, dear, very well,' replies Peggy, with a long
impatient sigh, stroking her sister's hair; 'have it your
own way; only I fancy he would take more killing than
that.'

And now Christmas has gone, and the New Year come;
and Freddy has returned to his studies, leaving his aunt
still in ignorance of those tidings which his exquisite tact
has not yet found the right moment to communicate.

And now the spring is coming on with slow green steps.
The brown earth is rubbing her eyes, in preparation for
her blossomed wakening. Peggy's garden, so long iron-bound,
is beginning to turn in its sleep. Jacob and she
have gone together round their domain, counting over the[Pg 221]
dead and wounded that the long frost has left them in
legacy. Among the dead, the irrecoverably dead, to which
no Easter sunshine or April rains can bring back any little
green shoots of life, is the old lavender-bush.

What matter? There are plenty of young ones. And
yet, as she stands looking at the dry wreck of last year's
fragrance, a hot and foolish tear steals into each eye. Her
back is turned towards Jacob, who is examining the mowing-machine,
which will soon be again needed.

'It wants fettlin' a bit,' he says in a grumbling voice;
'it has never been the same since that Muster Talbot
meddled wi' it.'

Poor Muster Talbot! There is not much fear of his
meddling with the mowing-machine ever again. She lifts
her eyes, still a little obscured by those tears, to the sky,
and they follow a pigeon, its wings silver-white as they
turn in the sun. It is flying southwards. She wishes idly
that it would fly to him to tell him that the lavender-bush
is dead, and the mowing-machine broken; only it should
choose a moment when Lady Betty is not by, as such silly
news would not interest her.

She strolls away from Jacob, his last remark having
given her a distaste for his conversation; strolls away into
the little orchard, listening to the birds. How loud they
are! and despite the long winter, how many! What a
honeyed Babel of strong little voices! There is the thrush,
of course:

'The wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!'

But besides the thrush's dominant harmony, how many
others there are! There are the chiff-chaff's clear reiterations;
the wren, with a voice so much bigger than her tiny
body; the chaffinch's laugh-like notes; the robin's, who,[Pg 222]
not content with his own pretty song, that perhaps he
thinks smacks too much of winter, puzzlingly mimics
other singers. She lifts her eyes, shaded by her hand, to
look at them, as they swing—jubilant specks—on twig and
tree-top. How they are bragging of their happiness! outbragging
one another! They are extravagantly gay, and
yet their melodies bring the tears to her eyes. Perhaps
they remind her that she is alone. Perhaps—more likely,
indeed, since she is not very apt to be thinking of herself
at all—they remind her of another extravagant gaiety,
over which she rejoices or half rejoices in trembling. It is
only in trembling that any human soul can see one they
love uplifted to such a height of extravagant joy as that
on which Prue now sits queening it over the workaday
world. 'Can it last?' is the anxious question that Peggy
asks herself a hundred times a day; finds herself feverishly
asking when she wakes up at night.

If Prue's beauty, such as it is, can keep him, then indeed
she has a better chance than ever; for love has put a
meaning into the poor soul's insignificant lilies and roses,
and made her transiently beautiful. If love, insane and
limitless; love at once grovelling and soaring; love that
would kiss the dust from his feet, or be burned by a slow
fire to give him a moment's pleasure—if love such as this
can bind him, then is he bound indeed. But can it?

'I wish you would not spoil him so,' Peggy says grudgingly
one day, during the Easter vacation, when her sister
has come hurrying from garden to house, on some errand
of Freddy's. 'I cannot bear to see you fetching and
carrying for him; it is such a reversal of the right order
of things. You spend your life in waiting upon him hand
and foot!'

'How could I spend it better?' replies Prue, the
rapturous colour coming into her face, and the moisture
into her radiant eyes.[Pg 223]

And so Peggy has to submit, has to overhear ten and
twenty times a day:

'My Prue, if you are going to the house—of course, do
not go on purpose—my darling, I could not hear of such a
thing! What do you suppose that I am made of? Well,
of course, if you insist! it is awfully good of you! I will
do as much for you when I am as young as you are,' etc.
'Prue, there is a fly on my forehead! I cannot get at my
own hands somehow; do you think you could flick it off
for me!' 'Oh, Prue! my head burns so! feel it! You do
not happen to have any eau-de-Cologne in the room, do
you? No? Then do not trouble to go upstairs for it.
What? You have been to fetch it! Bad Prue! and I
told you not!'

Easter has fallen late this year, and so has come with
pomp of pear-blossom, with teeming primroses, with garden
hyacinth and field daffodil; has come, too, with a breath
like June's. The garden-chairs are set out; and on them,
just as if it were midsummer, only that above their heads
the Judas-tree holds leafless arms, the lovers sit, through
the splendour of the lengthening days.

Freddy has said many a charming thing about the pear-blossom;
about nature's awakening; about the hymeneal
birds—things that, as Prue says, are almost poetry just as
he speaks them, without any alteration. But he will not
be able to say any more to-day, since he lies under one of
his mysterious obligations—an obligation which he not
darkly hints to have been imposed upon him by his aunt—to
dine and sleep at a house in the neighbourhood.

'Milady has ignored them for twenty years,' he says of
his intended hosts; 'and now she is sending me out as her
dove, with her olive-branch. Of course I could not be so
selfish as to refuse her. But,' with a heavy sigh, 'I wish
she would carry her olive-branch herself!'

'It seems hard that one can never be perfectly well off
without there coming some element of change and disintegration,'
says Freddy, with a subdued sadness. 'Well,
God bless you, darling! Take care of her, Peggy! Take
good care of my Prue! Be waiting for me, Prue, at the
garden-gate at twelve o'clock to-morrow!'

And Prue does wait, is waiting long before the appointed
hour; waits—it would be piteous to say for how long after
that hour—waits in vain, for Freddy comes not. He does
not return all that day; nor is it till late on the next that
he comes stepping, cool and smiling, across the evening
shadows.

But she speaks, as she had known that she would, to
inattentive ears. It was, indeed, only as a relief to her
own feelings that she had given that futile counsel. It is
some time before they rejoin her, and when they do—

'It was not quite so bad as you expected, I suppose?'
Margaret says, a little drily.

'When is anything so bad as one expects?' replies
Freddy evasively, throwing himself into his accustomed
chair; 'by Jove! how the pear-tree has come out since I left!'

'That was two whole days ago!' says Prue, rather
wistfully.

'Two whole days ago!—so it was—

"Measured by opening and by closing flowers!"

Prue, do you happen to have a needle about you? No?
Of course I do not mean to give you the trouble of going
into the house to fetch one; some people have a crop of
needles always about them. Oh, Prue!—stop! I am
shocked—that is the last thing I meant!'[Pg 225]

But poor Prue is off like a lapwing.

'You stayed longer than you intended?' says Peggy
interrogatively.

'Yes;—by Jove, Peggy! do not you wish you could
paint? Did you ever see anything like the colour of that
sky behind the pear-blossom?'

'Did you like them?'

'Oh, you know I like everybody,' answers he vaguely;
'I do not think I possess the faculty of dislike. I think,'
pensively, 'that in every human soul, if one gets near
enough to it, there is something to love; and,' with a
change of key, 'good heavens, are not they rich! They
have a yacht of 500 tons; they are going round the world
in her next autumn; they asked me to go too. I should
like to go round the world.'

'To go round the world!' repeats Peggy, with a rather
blank look; 'but by that time you will have taken your
degree. You will have settled down to some steady work,
will not you?—whatever work you have decided upon.
By the bye, are you any nearer a choice than you were
when last I spoke to you?'

Freddy agitates his curly head in an easy negative.

'I am afraid not the least; but, after all, there is no
great hurry. I think,' with his serious air, 'that one ought
to interrogate one's own nature very deeply before one decides
on a question of such moment; and meanwhile,' becoming
gay again, 'I should like to go round the world with the
Hartleys—would not you, Peg? No?—well, I should.'

CHAPTER XXIV

It is May morning, but May morning as yet in early
childhood—a radiant infancy that but few persons comparatively
are awake to see. It has not struck five; and
yet on the top of Magdalen Tower, in Oxford, Talbot is
standing. Love has not driven him crazy, as might be the
inference drawn from this fact. But those who know
Oxford, know too that, as some say, since the time of
Henry VIII.—though that overshoots the mark—Magdalen
College has observed the rule of sending up her sweet-voiced
choir to the summit of Wolsey's Tower on each new May
morning, to greet the sun's uprising with a monkish hymn.
And there are never wanting those who think it worth
while to leave their beds almost before night has withdrawn,
to hear those sweet singers greet the dawn with the ancient
piety of their Latin hymn; and amongst them, as chance
has brought him to Oxford, stands Talbot. He has run
down to Oxford for Sunday; and since some of his fellow-guests
have willed to rise and be present at the keeping of
this unique and old-world custom, the fancy has taken him
to come too. Not since the first year of his undergraduate-ship
has he stood, as he now stands, on that stern height,
looking for once at the world as the birds look, having
climbed the steep and endless corkscrew stair. The years
that have passed him since then seem to go by him in
a solemn procession—solemn as this ante-dawning hour;
solemn as the worn pinnacles above his head that have cut[Pg 227]
the blue of day, and pointed to the planets of night,
through three hundred rolling years; solemn as the great
and dying moon that is only waiting for her greater
brother's upspringing to fade away and be not.

In each interval of the ancient balustrades, and through
the opening in the pierced stone, Talbot can see far down
a picture differently lovely. Here the world-famous street,
taking its way between its schools and stately college-fronts;
and with its Mary church's noble spire and the Radcliffe's
dome for crown and finish. Here again the low, scarce
swelling hills that so softly girdle the fair town, with the
morning mists, not yet sun-pierced, streaming across their
dim flanks. Here the river stealing; there the bridge,
with its black cluster of men and women, waiting to hear
the Hymnus Eucharisticus float down. Here a white snow
of cherry-blossom in some garden; there, close at hand, so
that he can look down, far below, upon their rooks' nests,
Magdalen's tenderly greening trees. Infinite gradations of
tender green; infinite gradations of delicate blue dying
into dreamy gray, all woven into a mantle in which to
wrap the yet sleeping city; and above it all, above Talbot,
as he stands, lifted half-way to heaven, as it seems, in the
august hush of the dawn, is the arch, severely beautiful, of
a sky that seems made out of one pale, perfect turquoise.

He has moved away from his companions. He does
not want them; does not want any companion. He leans
against the parapet; and his eyes rise to the great old
pinnacles, whose time-painted gray is married in such
marvellous harmony to the cold azure into which they
climb. Talbot is thinking of Peggy. She can never be
at any very great distance from his thoughts, since there
is no fair sight that does not, in one instant, conjure her
back to them. There is nothing beautiful whose beauty
he does not gauge by its worthiness to be looked at by her.
To that height of excellence he acknowledges that the[Pg 228]
spectacle he is now looking upon attains. He would like
her to see it. Where is she now? What is she doing?
Doing? Why, asleep, of course; placidly slumbering; or
perhaps not so placidly dreaming of Prue. But why is it
that on this May morning Talbot is only thinking of Peggy?
Why, since it is now more than four months since he was
set free to seek her, is he still seeking her only in thought?
Surely even his busy life may have spared him the
necessary moment to put his fortune

'To the touch, To win, or lose it all.'

He had meant to have sought her at Easter. To put a
lesser interval than that which stretches from Christmas
to Easter between the decent interment of the old love and
the proclamation of the new would have seemed to him a
disrespect—a disloyalty to that now dead but once so
living passion. Why, by showing such an overhaste to
take upon himself another tie than hers, should he cut to
the quick her who, not so long ago, was all earth, and all
heaven too to him? But when Easter comes, it brings
with it the news, borne on the breath of common fame, of
the serious illness of that old love; and again his loyalty
forbids him—while she, who for five years made sunshine
or storm in his life, lies on what may perhaps be her
death-bed—to go courting another than she. And before
the tidings of her recovery reach him his holiday has been
long over. He will have no other worth the name until
Whitsun. But to Whitsun there are now only twenty-one
days. 'Only twenty-one days!' he says to himself under
his breath, still looking up at the pinnacle. He could of
course have written to her; but from that he has shrunk
with unconquerable repugnance. To put a cold proposition
in cold black and white upon cold paper? What could she
do but say 'No' to it? He will ask her by word of mouth;[Pg 229]
if possible under the Judas-tree, with Minky lying on her
gown, so that she can't rise up hastily and flee from him.
Will ask her by word of mouth, eye to eye; and with such
a compelling urgency of look and speech that she shall say
'Yes' to him—if out of nothing else, out of sheer pity for
his great and utter need of her. 'Twenty-one days and
twenty-one nights!' he repeats to himself once again.

The choristers stand surpliced, looking eastwards to
where the sun is rearing his red shoulder. The crowd on
the old lead roof is thickening. Undergraduates in cap
and gown; fat Fellows, thin Fellows; young ladies, old
ladies—every moment a new head, with an expression of
relief upon its features at having come to the end of its
corkscrew scramble, appears at the head of the ladder that
closes the climb. Talbot is not paying much attention to
any of them, least of all, perhaps, to his own party, when a
voice that has surely a familiar ring in it brings him back
to the present.

'You see, dear, you need not have been in such a fuss;
we are in plenty of time. The sun has waited for us, as
I told you he would.'

Talbot's eyes have sprung to the speaker. Yes, of course
it is Freddy Ducane. But after all there is nothing very
wonderful in that; for has not he already known Freddy
to be pursuing his studies in Oxford? But who is it whom
Freddy has addressed as 'dear'? As to that, Talbot is
not long left in doubt. Close behind young Ducane, as
though afraid of being separated from him by the press,
two girls are eagerly following. There are two in reality,
but Talbot sees only one. She is not asleep after all; not
dreaming of Prue, or of any one else. She is here, wide
awake, on the top of Magdalen Tower, not three feet from
him, and with her great blue eyes plunged into his. There
are some moments in looking back upon which afterwards
one wonders how it came about that they did not kill one.[Pg 230]

Sometimes, in the retrospect of after-days, Talbot marvels
what he could have been made of, not to have fallen dead
at her feet on the top of that giddy tower out of sheer joy.
He has but just realised her presence, when five grave
strokes beat the air. The clock is telling that it is five,
the immemorial hour at which the May-Day hymn is wont
to soar heavenwards. In a moment a hush has fallen upon
the buzzing crowd. Off goes every college cap. All eyes
look eastward to where the vanquishing sun has now fairly
emerged from night and mist, and sweetly and softly
upsails to heaven the ancient monkish hymn:

The harmony has swelled up skywards, and again died
into silence; and no sooner has it ceased than the great
bells imprisoned in the belfry below take up the tale.
Standing so immediately above them, they do not sound
like bells, rather like some loud vague booming music;
and to that loud booming music the meeting of Talbot and
Margaret is set.

'Talbot!' Freddy has cried cordially, on catching sight
of him; 'my dear fellow, I am delighted to see you!
Peggy, Prue, are you awake enough to realise that this is
Talbot? Who on earth would have expected to find you
up here?'

And Prue's little voice has echoed, 'Who indeed?' and
Peggy has said nothing; but the touch of her hand in his—the
thirsty aching dream of so many empty months—is
a reality; and for him too the day is breaking, not less
genuinely than is the real day so superbly opening—

'Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, The glorious sun uprist.'

The first beam has struck one of the lofty pinnacles,[Pg 231]
and made laughter and gaiety of its tercentenary gloom.
Now it is laying long shadows about mead and street—shadows
of noble buildings, of cropping cows, of commonplace
yet dawn-ennobled houses, and of vernal trees. Far
below on the bridge is the pigmy crowd, with the vulgar
din of its May horns, blown thus early, in ill-survival of
some Puritan custom, to drown the notes of the Latin
hymn. But here, high up above the world, is no music
but that august one of the loud bells; no sight but the
arch of the perfect sky, and the solid grandeur of God's
first best gift to man—new light.

In this stately dawning they stand together, he and she,
despite the crowd, virtually alone; for Prue has drawn
away Freddy to point out to him what is indeed startlingly
obvious, the rocking of the tower under the vibration of
the bells. Several undergraduates—more indeed than not—are
taking off their college caps, and flinging them down
over the battlements. The wind blows colder with the
sunrise, but they pay little heed to its chill admonishment.
With their bare young heads they stand laughing and
leaning down to watch the fate of their mortar-boards.
Most alight on the college roofs; one sticks on a pinnacle,
greatly to its owner's delight. There is a noise of young
voices, exclamations, bets, jolly laughter, on the crisp
morning air. And meanwhile Talbot and Margaret stand
staring at each other, silent at first; for how from such a
torrent of words as he has to pour out before her can he
choose which to begin with?

At last, 'I—I—did not expect to meet you here,' he
says stupidly.

'Nor I you.'

'Are you staying in Oxford?'

'Yes, at the Mitre. Freddy was very anxious that we
should come, and so Lady Roupell brought us.'

She answers him quietly, in a rather low voice, but she[Pg 232]
does not on her side originate any question. Can it be
that she is struggling with a difficulty in any degree akin
to his own? Urged by this dazzling possibility; urged
still more by the shortness of the time—since what security
is there that Prue may not be back upon them at any
moment with some fresh discovery about the tower or the
bells?—he hazards a speech of greater significance, of such
significance in his own eyes that he trembles almost as
much as the bell-rocked tower in making it.

'At the moment I first caught sight of you, and before
that, I was thinking of you.'

'Were you?'

'I suppose that there are few things in the world more
unlikely than that you were thinking of me?'

She hesitates a second. He sees by a sort of distress
in her sweet, candid eyes, that she would like to be able
to tell him that she had been thinking of him. But she
evidently had not, and is too honest to be able to feign
that she had.

'I was not thinking of you at that moment,' she answers
reluctantly; 'I was too much out of breath with my climb,'
she adds, with a rather embarrassed laugh, 'to be thinking
of anything.'

'Oh, Peggy,' cries Prue, breaking in upon them, in
realisation of Talbot's fear, 'he has thrown his cap over
too! Is not it foolish of him? Is not he sure to catch
cold? And I do not see how he is ever to get it again.'

'As to that, dear,' replies Freddy philosophically, gracefully
winding his gown about his neck and over his head,
'I am not at all anxious, as it was not mine.' So saying,
he again draws away his little sweetheart, or she him, and
the other pair are a second time alone. But for how long?

'Are they—are they—all right?' inquires John, recalling
what strides to intimacy he had formerly made by the
agency of Prue's love affairs.[Pg 233]

'Yes, does not she?' returns Peggy eagerly. 'Is not
she improved? Is not she wonderfully prettier than when
last you saw her?'

Talbot hesitates a second. He knows, of course, that
Prue has a face; but whether it is a pretty or an ugly one,
a bettered or a worsened one since last he looked upon it,
he knows no more than if it had never been presented to
his vision.

'Whether you see it or not,' says Peggy, a little piqued
at his unreadiness to acquiesce, 'it is so; everybody sees
it.'

'But she always was pretty, was not she?' asks he
eagerly, trying to retrieve his blunder. 'Could she be
prettier than she always was? and happiness is mostly
becoming.'

He looks wistfully at her face as he speaks, as if he
would not mind trying the effect of that recipe upon his
own beauty—so wistfully that she turns away with a sort
of confusion; and, resting her hand on the battlement that
is still swaying almost like a ship on a sea under the bells'
loud joyaunce, looks down. The sun has risen higher.
Opposite him his pale sister is swooning away in the west.
Before his proud step the spring green grows vivider. The
smoke from the morning fires new lit, curls, beautiful as a
mist, above the ennobled dwelling-houses, swallowing what
is vulgar from sight, as unworthy of the new King's eyes.

The two young people stand tranced for a moment or
two side by side without speaking; then Peggy says in a
low voice, and with an apparently complete irrelevance to
anything that had gone before:

'And the mowing-machine is broken,' adds she, beginning
to laugh, though a little tremulously. 'Jacob says it
has never been the same since you meddled with it.'

'Jacob and I were always rivals. Then he is not dead
too?'

'No.'

'Nor the fox?'

'No.'

'Nor Mink?'

'No.'

'Nor the parrot?'

'No.'

How delightful it seems to him to be standing there in
the dawning, asking her after them all! He would like to
inquire by name after every one of the eleven finches in
the big cage. The crowd has very much thinned. There
has been for a quarter of an hour a continual disappearance
down the ladder of successive anxious human heads.

'Oh, Peggy!' cries Prue, again running up; 'are you
ready? We are going down; which way shall you go—backwards
or forwards? He says forwards; but I think I
had rather go backwards, because I shall not see what is
coming. Which way shall you?'

'I shall go forwards,' replies Peggy, with a sort of start.
'I had always rather see the worst coming, whatever it is.'

As she speaks she turns, with what he recognises as
a good-bye look, to Talbot. Is it over already, then? Is
this to be all? Can it be his fancy that there has come
upon her face a sort of reflection of the blankness of his
own—that her eyes, lifted in farewell to his, ask his eyes
back again, as his are asking hers, 'Is this to be all?'
What! let her slip now that God has sent her to his arms
on this strange high place in this blessed vernal morning?
The thought fills him with a sort of rage that, in its turn,
lends him a boldness he had never before known with her.[Pg 235]

'Are you going to say "Good-bye" to me?' he asks,
with a kind of scorn. 'Then you may save yourself the
trouble; for I have not the remotest intention of saying
"Good-bye" to you.'

Prue has fled away again to the stairhead, and from it
her little voice now sounds in peremptory imploring:

'Peggy! Peggy! come quick! I want you to go down
first. I shall not be frightened if you will go down first.
I want you to show me which way you mean to go—backwards
or forwards. Peggy! Peggy!'

And Peggy, obedient to the tones which, whether
querulous or coaxing, have constituted her law for seventeen
years, turns to obey. She will slip from him after
all! The thought frenzies him. Before he knows what
he is doing he has laid his hand in determined detention
on her wrist.

'You shall not go!' he says, with an authority which
has come to him in his extremity he does not know whence.
'She does not need you a thousandth part as much as I do.
Has not she her Ducane? She is greedy! Must she have
everything? Let her call!'

Peggy's course is arrested. She stands quite still, with
her blue eyes, bluer than he has ever seen them, looking
straight at him, in a sort of waking trance.

'But—she—wants me!' she falters.

'And do not I want you?' asks he, unconsciously emphasising
his pressure on her wrist. 'Dare you look me
in the face, and tell me that I do not want you? You are
a truthful woman—too truthful by half, I thought, the first
time I met you. Look me in the eyes if you dare, and tell
me that you believe I do not want you.'

She does what he tells her—at least half of it. She
looks him penetratingly full in the eyes. If the least grain
of falsity lurk in either of his, that clear and solemn gaze
of hers must seek it out.[Pg 236]

'If you do want me,' she says slowly, and with a
trembling lip, 'it has come lately to you.'

'Lately!' echoes he, his voice growing lower as the tide
of his passion sweeps higher. 'What do you call lately?
I wanted you the first moment I saw you; was not that
soon enough? How much sooner would you have had it?
The first moment I saw you—do you recollect it? when
you were so angry at being sent in to dinner with me that
you would not be commonly civil to me; that you turned
your back upon me, and insulted me as well as you knew
how—I wanted you then. I have wanted you ever since—every
hour of every day and every night; and I want you—God
knows whether I want you—now!'

Prue's callings have ceased; the small laughters, exclamations,
appeals, have died into silence. Her and
Freddy's pretty heads have both disappeared. Talbot and
Peggy are left the last upon the tower-top. Her lip
trembles.

'You did not want me last autumn, and you have not
seen me since.'

'No, worse luck!' cries he passionately; 'but you need
not throw that in my teeth. You might pity me for it, I
think. Eight whole months gone, Peggy—wasted, lost out
of our short lives! But how dare you stand there and say
that I have not wanted you, do not want you, autumn,
winter, summer, spring? You are confusing, perhaps,
between yourself and me. You do not want me, that is
likely enough. You could not even pretend to have been
giving me one poor thought when I asked you. You
would have been glad—I saw by your face that your kind
heart would have been glad—if you could have told me,
with any semblance of truth, that you had been thinking
of me; but you had not. I was miles away from you.'

Her lip is trembling again, and her chest heaving.
She has not had many love-tales told her; not many more[Pg 237]
perhaps, or of much better quality, than those with which
Lady Betty had spitefully credited her. She has let her
eyes fall, because she feels them to be filling up with foolish
drops; but now lifts them again, and they look with their
old directness, though each has a tear in it, into his.

'Why did you go away?'

Why did he go away? That is a question to which, in
one sense, the answer is easy enough. 'Because Lady Betty
Harborough sent him.' In another—the only one, unfortunately,
in which he can employ it—it is absolutely
unanswerable.

'Why did you go away?' She has asked the question,
and, with her eyes on his, awaits the answer.

And he? He but now so fluent, with such a stream of
eager words to pour straight and hot from his heart into
hers, he stands dumb before her.

She does not repeat the question; but she does what is
far worse, she moves away to the stairhead and disappears,
as all the other votaries of the ceremony, as Freddy and
Prue have disappeared, down the ladder.

He follows her, baffled and miserable, gnashing his
teeth. Is it possible that the gyves he had thought to
have cast off for ever are here, manacling him again as
soon as he tries to make one free step? Is the old love
to throttle him now with the same strangling clasp, dead,
that it had done living? Before God, no! Not if he can
hinder it. She has not waited for him at the tower-foot;
but he overtakes her before she has reached the High
Street, and without asking her leave.

The crowd on the bridge has dispersed. The city
clocks, with their variously-toned voices, are striking six;
to their daily toil the workmen, with tools on back, are
swinging along. To them there is certainly nothing unfamiliar,
probably nothing lovely, in the morning's marvellous
clean novelty, that novelty renewed each dawning,[Pg 238]
as if God had said not once only but day by day, 'Lo, I
make all things new!'

'You asked me a question just now,' says Talbot
abruptly.

'Yes.'

'And I did not answer it; I could not. I cannot
answer it now. As long as you and I shall live, I can
never answer it!'

He stops, pale and panting, and looks at her with a
passionate anxiety. O God! Is Betty's shadow to come
between them still? Betty renouncing and renounced;
Betty gone, swept away, vanished. Is she still to thrust
herself between him and his new heaven? Still to be his
bane, his evil demon? Still to lay waste that life, five of
whose prime years she has already burnt and withered?
If it be so, then verily and indeed his sin has found him
out.

In passionate anxiety he looks at his companion; but
she is holding her head low, and he cannot get a good view
of her face.

'Why do you walk so fast?' he asks irritably, his eyes
taking in the rapidly diminishing space that lies before him.
'Is not the distance short enough in all conscience without
your lessening it? Walk slower.'

She slackens her pace; but still she does not speak.

'You asked me why I went away?' he continues almost
in a whisper, and with his heart beating like a steam-ram.
'Does that mean that it made any difference to you?
May I make it mean that it did? Stay—do not speak—I
will not let it mean anything else. If you say that it
did not, I will not believe you. I cannot afford to believe
you!'

He has forbidden her to speak, and yet now he pauses,
hanging in a suspense that is almost ungovernable—for
they have passed Queen's classic front, are passing 'All[Pg 239]
Souls'—upon her slow-coming words. There is a little
stir upon her face; a tiny hovering smile.

'I was sorry that you went without your lavender!'

'I am coming back for it,' he cries passionately, the
joy-tide sweeping up over his heart to his lips, and almost
drowning his words. 'Coming back for it—for it and for
all else that I left behind me!'

The smile spreads, red and wavering.

'You left nothing else; I sent all your books after you.'

'Yes,' he says reproachfully, 'you were very conscientious.
It would have been kinder to be a little
dishonest. You might have kept back the one that we
had been reading out of. I had a faint hope that you
might have kept it back.'

'I did think of it,' she answers, under her breath.

'The mark is in it still!' he cries joyfully. 'Shall we
take it up again where we left off? Where shall we sit?
Under the Judas-tree?'

Her flickering smile dies into gravity.

'You are getting on very fast,' she says tremulously.
'Are you sure that it is not too fast?'

They have passed St. Mary's; noble porch and soaring
spire lie behind them.

'Is it worth while your coming,' she continues, with
evident difficulty, and with a quiver she cannot master in
her low voice, 'when at any moment you may be obliged
to go away again?'

'Why should I be obliged to go away again?'

Her voice has sunk to a key that is almost inaudible.

'I am only judging of the future by the past.'

He groans. The past! Is he never to escape from the
past? never to hear the last of it? Is it always to dog
him to his dying day?

'Are you sure?' she pursues, lifting—though, as he
sees, with untold pain—the searching honesty of her eyes[Pg 240]
to his, while a fierce red spot burns on each of her cheeks,
'that you are not promising more than you can perform
when you talk of coming? Are you sure that—you—are
free—to come? You know—you were—not free to stay.'

His face has caught a reflection of the crimson dyeing
hers, but his look shows no sign of blenching.

'I am free,' he answers slowly and emphatically. 'Why
do you look as if you did not believe me? Cannot you
trust me?'

At his words a shadow passes over her face. Is not
Freddy Ducane always inviting her to trust him? She
has grown to hate the phrase.

'I am not good at trusting people,' she says plaintively,
with a slight shiver. 'I do not like it.'

They have reached the door of the Mitre.

'Over already!' cries Talbot, in a voice of passionate
revolt and discontent; 'my own good hour gone before I
had well laid hold of it? Who could believe it? Then at
least,' speaking very rapidly, 'say something to me—something
else—something better! Whether you trust me or
not—God knows why you should not—do not let me go
away with that for——'

'Peggy dear,' interrupts a soft and rather melancholy
voice from an upper window above the door—and yet not
very much higher than they, so low and unpretending is the
old and famous inn in comparison with its staring towering
competitors—'we would not for worlds begin breakfast
without you; but I am afraid that Prue is growing rather
faint.'

CHAPTER XXV

Whitsun is here. Again the tired workers are let loose.
Again the great cities pour out their grimy multitudes over
the fair green country, upon which, year by year, day by
day almost, their sooty feet further and further encroach.
Among the multitudes there are, of course, a good many
who are not grimy. Cabinet ministers are, as a rule, not
grimy—nor fashionable beauties—nor famous lawyers; but
yet they all volley out, too, with the rest, to drink the
country air, and smell the cowslips. All over the country
the churches are being pranked for Whit-Sunday. It is
that festival for which there is least need for devout souls
to strip their hothouses and conservatories. In each parish
the meadows need only be asked to give a few never-missed
armfuls out of their perfumed plenty, and the church is a
bower. The brunt of the labour of decorating her church,
as of most other parish festivities, falls upon the shoulders—happily
vigorous ones—of Peggy Lambton. The Whitsuns,
Easters, Christmases, on which Mrs. Evans is not
hovering on the verge of a new baby or two, and consequently
handicapped for standing poised on ladders, are
so few as not to be worth taking into consideration. Prue
is willing; but her flesh is weak, and she tires easily.
With the aid, therefore—an interchangeable term, as she
sometimes thinks, for hindrance—of half a dozen of the
best among the young Evanses, Peggy endures the toil, and
reaps the glory alone. She has been standing most of the[Pg 242]
day, and for the greater part of the time with her arms
uplifted, so that she is sufficiently weary; but as the work
is not yet done, and there is no one to take her place, she
treats her own fatigue with the contempt it deserves.

It is tolerably late in the afternoon, and Mrs. Evans has
just looked in. Being in her normal condition, she has at
once sunk down upon a seat. Mr. Evans has sauntered in
after her. He has not much that is beautiful in his life;
and the sight of the garlanded church gives him a sort
of pale pleasure, something akin to that produced by the
luscious flow of his favourite poem. He could not stir a
finger to produce the effect himself; but he likes it when
it is done for him.

'What a size these gardenias are!' says Mrs. Evans,
fingering the blossoms in a box of hothouse flowers reserved
for the altar. 'From the Hartleys of course? They are
double as big as milady's. I wonder how her gardener
likes having all the prizes carried off from under his nose!
Dear me! what a thing money is! Burton, the butcher,
told me the other day that five and twenty prime joints go
into that house every week, beside soup-meat and poultry;
and of course they have their own game and rabbits. Five
and twenty prime joints, and a yacht that they can go
round the world in! Not, I am sure, that I envy them
that; for I am such a wretched sailor.'

Peggy makes no answer. Perhaps her attention is
sufficiently occupied by the management of her long garland
of cowslips, catchfly, and harebell; perhaps she has already
heard, though not from Mrs. Evans, more about that world-girdling
yacht than she cares to hear. She sighs, and her
sigh is taken up and echoed in a deeper key by the Vicar;
though whether his sigh is caused by regret at the sinful
profuseness of a parishioner, or by a reflection upon the
inequality of human destiny, that sends five and twenty
prime joints into one man's kitchen, and sets a solitary leg[Pg 243]
of mutton spinning on another man's spit, may be best
decided by those most acquainted with Mr. Evans's habitual
turn of thought.

'It is a great disadvantage to a neighbourhood having a
millionnaire in it,' pursues Mrs. Evans, going on contentedly
with her trickle of talk; 'it sends up the price of everything—even
eggs. I was saying so just now to Mrs. Bates
at the Roupell Arms. I wanted to know whether she could
let me have a dozen fresh ones. My hens are all sitting;
and you would not believe the number of eggs we get
through at the Vicarage—egg-puddings, and so on. Oh,
by the bye,' with a change to an alerter key, 'from what
she told me, I suppose that Lady Betty Harborough is
expected at the Manor.'

'Lady Betty Harborough!' she repeats slowly—'with
milady away?—most unlikely. Oh, now I see!' with a
sudden dawn of relief breaking over her face; 'now I
understand how the report has arisen! The children are
to arrive to-day, and so it was supposed that she must be
coming with them—of course, of course!'

'No; it has nothing to say to the children,' rejoins the
Vicar's wife cheerfully; 'and I cannot say that I have
heard in so many words that she is coming. It was only'
(looking cautiously down the aisle, and lowering her voice)—'I
suppose one ought not to talk scandal in a church,
but it really is such an open secret—that I concluded it
must be so, because a friend of hers is expected.'

'A friend of hers!' repeats Peggy slowly, the blood
rushing to her cheek and brow, as she stands poised in
space, with the unfinished wreath still dangling forgotten
before her.

'Rather more than a friend, I am afraid,' returns Mrs.[Pg 244]
Evans, with a significance by no means devoid of enjoyment.
'Dear me! I do not half like talking of it here; but, after
all, the truth is the truth. To the Roupell Arms of all
places, too! and there can be no mistake about it, for I
have just seen his portmanteau with "John Talbot, Esq.,"
in large letters upon it; his man arrived in charge of it
this afternoon, and he is to follow by a later train. It
really is too barefaced, is not it? I could see that Mrs.
Bates herself thought so though of course I did not breathe
a word to her.'

Peggy has put out a hand to steady herself on the
ladder, since, for a moment, church and heaped flower-baskets,
guelder roses and lilac branches, whirl round with
her. His portmanteau come, and he coming! It would
be a pity then if to-day, of all days, she were to break her
neck.

It is nearly three weeks since she had parted from him
at the door of the Mitre, in the middle of a sentence which
Freddy Ducane never gave him the chance to finish, or her
to answer; and since then she has heard neither tale nor
tidings of him. Why should she? Of course his octopus
has him again. Poor fellow! no doubt from those hundred
straggling polypus arms it is harder than she, with her life
ignorance, can estimate to tear himself free. And yet he
had said he was free; said so—yes. But men's words and
their actions are not apt to tally very nicely; at least, the
words and the actions of the only man with whom she has
any intimacy are not. 'They are all alike,' she has said to
herself, and so has gone heavily—a little more heavily
perhaps for that bootless, barren morning meeting on the
tower-top—about her daily work. And now he is here—as
good as here, at least—for does not his herald portmanteau
make sure his approach?

'I wonder how he will like his quarters,' continues Mrs.
Evans, with a rather malicious laugh. 'The beds are clean,[Pg 245]
I will say that for Mrs. Bates; but how a man accustomed
to a French chef will enjoy her chops and rashers, is
another question. She is very nervous about it herself,
good woman!'

Peggy laughs; a little low laugh.

'Of course Lady Betty will make a pretence of coming
to see her children,' pursues Mrs. Evans, warming with
her theme; 'and indeed, after the escape that boy had, I
cannot think how she can ever bear him out of her sight.
And as milady and Freddy are both away, they will have
the park all to themselves to philander in. It really is too
barefaced.'

'Too barefaced, is it?' repeats Peggy, softly smiling,
and staring at a great sheaf of sweet nancies that she has
absently picked up.

'Is it?' echoes Mrs. Evans in astonishment; 'why, is
not it? What other motive could bring him to such a dull
village as this?'

'What indeed?' replies Peggy with emphasis, while the
thought crosses her mind that she ought to feel mortified
at its evidently never having come within the range of the
Vicaress's possibilities that any one could visit a dull village
in search of her. 'It cannot surprise her more than it
does me,' she says to herself.

'One can only hope that he will be too uncomfortable
to stay long,' says Mrs. Evans, slowly rising, and preparing
to depart. 'Well, I wish I could help you' (this is a
formula that recurs as often as do the festivals of the
Church); 'but you are getting on capitally. Do you
think that the font is quite as pretty as it was last year?
I am so glad I sent the children to help you; do not
overtire yourself.'

She strolls away, with the contented feeling of having
done her part in the church decoration; but it is a couple
of hours later before Peggy follows her example. It is[Pg 246]
nearly eight o'clock when, with stiff arms and tired legs,
she enters the hall—embowered in spring blossoms, like
the church she has just left—of the Red House. As she
comes in Prue springs to meet her.

'Oh, Peggy, Peggy! have you heard?'

The elder sister's heart leaps. Prue understands. Prue
is glad—gladder than she had had any conception that she
would have been. Kind little Prue!

'Yes,' she falters, grateful surprised tears at her sister's
sympathy rushing to her eyes; 'yes, I have heard. Oh,
Prue, how nice of you to be glad!'

'Nice of me to be glad!' repeats Prue in a tone of
profound wonderment, her eyes growing round. 'Why is
it nice of me? It would be very odd of me if I were not
glad; but I do not see anything nice about it. How did
you hear? Has milady come back? Have you seen
any one from the Big House? Why, I only got the letter
by the second post.'

'The letter?' repeats Peggy stupidly; 'what letter?'

'What letter? why, his letter of course, telling me that
he is not going to stay up for Commemoration after all:
he says that without me the balls would be Dead Sea
apples to him, so he will be home a week sooner; and the
Hartleys are going, and they will not find him there after
all. But oh, Peggy! how could you have heard? I do not
believe that you did. Why did you say you had?'

The sparkle, but now as bright in Peggy's eyes as in
her junior's, dies out; a cold ripple of disappointment
rises, and flows over her heart. Prue was not glad for her,
after all. It was her own preoccupation that had credited
her sister with a knowledge and an interest of which she is
quite innocent.

'You shall tell me about it at dinner,' she answers in
an altered voice, turning away.

And at dinner Prue does tell her all about it. Too[Pg 247]
excited to eat, she chatters through their simple repast
about the beauty of Freddy's renunciation; his thoughtfulness
for others; the irreparable loss that Commemoration
will sustain by his absence; the bitter disappointment of
Miss Hartley.

Into the middle of her talk, near the close of their short
dinner, comes the sound of a railway whistle, announcing
the arrival of one of the few stopping trains—in this case
the last train of all that touches at their little station.
Peggy involuntarily puts up her hand, and cries:
'Hush!'

'The wind must be changed,' she says, reddening at the
consciousness of her own motive, though she is safe indeed
from having it divined, 'one hears the train so plainly; it
is late to-night!'

'What of that?' cries Prue gaily; 'are you expecting a
friend by it? Ah, me! how I wish that I was! He came
by that train last time.'

And so Peggy keeps her tidings to herself. Perhaps if
she had had some one to impart them to they would not
have made her so restless. As it is, she cannot settle to
any occupation. The wheels that will roll him from the
station to his inn must pass her door; and through all the
trickle of Prue's talk her ear is pricked to catch them.
But it is market night, and from the many vehicles noisily
passing by, her hearing is incapable of disentangling his.
He must have reached the Roupell Arms by now. Is Mrs.
Bates setting a very unappetising dinner before him, so
unappetising that it will, in accordance with Mrs. Evans's
pious aspiration, drive him prematurely away?

'How fidgety you are!' cries Prue, surprised at her
sister's unusual restlessness. 'I should have thought that
you would have been thankful to sit down, after being on
your legs all day.'

'So should I,' replies Peggy, again blushing, and sitting[Pg 248]
down; 'and I have been upon them since ten o'clock in
the morning, have not I?'

'It is quite disgraceful the way in which the Evanses
put everything upon you!' cries Prue indignantly; 'though
indeed'—with an accent of remorse not very common to
her—'I do not think that they are much worse than the
rest of us. Why does everybody put everything upon you,
Peggy? You do everything for everybody, and nobody
ever does anything for you.'

Peggy's eyes brim up at this unexpected recognition of
her services by the seventeen-years sovereign of them. Are
all good things to come to her together?

CHAPTER XXVI

It is Whit-Sunday. The morning service is over. The
parish has had an opportunity of admiring Peggy's nosegays,
and of having their nostrils comforted by the scent
of her lilac branches and sweet nancies, and of the Hartleys'
giant gardenias. Among them a stranger has knelt.
Strangers are not very apt to be allured to Roupell Church
by the fame of Mr. Evans's sermons; and, indeed, to-day
he has preached the same sermon as he did last Whit-Sunday.
It would have passed among his flock for a new
one, had it not been for an unusual phrase which they
remember and recognise. But since they recognise it with
pleasure, as an old friend, there is no harm done.

'Did you see that he was in church?' cries Mrs. Evans,
hurrying breathlessly out after Peggy, and joining her
before she has reached the lych-gate. 'Did you ever hear
of anything so barefaced? It never occurred to me that he
would come to church. Oh, here are the children! now
we shall learn whether she has arrived too.'

As she speaks the little Harboroughs, who apparently
have hitherto been kept at bay by their nurses, are seen—having
broken away from them—to be elbowing their
vigorous small way through the press of country people,
who smilingly make way for them. In another second,
both, with entire disregard of the Vicaress's blandishments,
have flung themselves upon Peggy.

'Oh, Miss Lambton, we came last night! How is the[Pg 250]
fox? I saw Alfred in church. What a lot of freckles he
has got! May not I come and see Mink and the kittens?
May Franky come too?' asks Lily volubly.

'Of course he may,' replies Peggy kindly, warmly
returning the little boy's ardent embrace. 'Why, Franky
dear, I have never seen you since you were so ill!—you
were very ill, were not you?'

'The doctor thought he was going to die,' answers Lily,
officiously replying for her brother before he can set his
slower tongue in motion; 'and mammy never took off her
clothes for three nights, and father cried; and if Franky
had died, I should have had no little brother!' She makes
this last statement in a rather triumphant tone, as a fact
redounding a good deal to her own credit. 'Why, there
is John Talbot!' cries she. 'Franky wanted to go to him
in church. Did you ever hear of anything so silly? Now,
Franky, who will get to him first?'

But as she dishonestly sets off before poor Franky has
had time to withdraw his sturdy body and fat legs out of
Peggy's embrace, there is not much doubt as to the answer
to her question. However, though Franky is the last to
arrive, and arrives weeping at his sister's injustice, and
crying, 'You nasty thing, you did not start fair!' yet he
has, by much, the warmer welcome.

Is not one welcomed back from the grave's brink
deserving of a closer clasp, of tenderer kisses, than one
who has only returned from his daily walk? Franky has
quite forgotten—if, indeed, he ever, save through Lily's
information, knew—how nearly his curly head had been
laid in the dust. But Talbot cannot forget it.

'I wish he would not hug those children,' says Mrs.
Evans, sotto voce; 'it gives me quite a turn. Well, Fanny,'
as one of her own offspring plucks her by the sleeve,
'what is it now? Mr. Allnutt wants to speak to me?
Dear me! some one is always wanting to speak to me!'[Pg 251]

She turns aside reluctantly to interview her parishioner,
and Peggy goes on alone. But it can hardly be said to be
tête-à-tête, or without a chaperone, that she puts her hand
in Talbot's under the lime-leaves, young and juicy, stirring
in the brisk spring wind.

'Oh, Miss Lambton,' cries Lily, 'may not John Talbot
come to the Red House too?'

As she speaks the face of the object of her kind patronage
falls perceptibly.

'Are you coming to the Red House?' he asks, with a
slight accent of disappointment; 'what, both of you?—now?'

'Miss Lambton says we way,' rejoins she, happily
innocent of the motive that had prompted her friend's
inquiry; 'and we may stay to luncheon, and all afternoon,
may not we?'

Peggy laughs.

'We will see about that.'

'And John Talbot may come too?' urges Miss Harborough
pertinaciously, making play with her eyelashes;
'he would like to come.'

'And stay to luncheon, and all afternoon?' adds Talbot,
emphasising his apparently playful suggestion by a long
pressure of the hand he has forgotten to drop.

He has to drop it soon, however; for it is claimed by
Franky, as well as one of his own. Franky insists upon
walking between his two friends; where, by dragging well
at their arms, he is enabled to execute many playful
somersaults, and, from under the ægis of their protection,
to make faces at his sister; who, having discovered that
she can thereby better watch their countenances, is backing
before them.

Under these circumstances, conversation between the
elders is not easy, nor is there much of it. But the birds
in the thickets they pass make talk for them; and the[Pg 252]
leaves fresh escaped from their sheaths, and to whom the
wind is a new playfellow, rustle their pleasure in his
gambols to them, as they walk along beneath; and across
the barrier of the little rosy child their hearts cry out to
each other. They would be in heaven; but that Lily, by
a judicious pull of the skirts, brings them down to earth
again.

'Why do you never come to Harborough now?' inquires
she, fixing Talbot with the unescapable vigilance of her
large child-eyes; 'you used to be always coming. Would
not you like to come? I will get mammy to ask you.'

There is a moment of silence. For a second even the
kind finches seem cruelly still. Then,

'What are you holding my hand so tight for?' asks
Franky plaintively. 'Why have you begun to squeeze it
so? You hurt me!'

'I asked mammy the other day,' pursues Miss Harborough,
with all her species' terrible tenacity of an idea
once grasped, 'why you never came to see us now, and
she began to cry; and when I asked her what she was
crying for, she boxed my ears: she never boxes Franky's
ears!'

This remark is followed by another silence. Peggy is
apparently looking straight before her; but yet out of the
tail of her eye she manages to see that Talbot is quite
beyond speech. She must come to the rescue.

'I have no doubt that you richly deserved it,' says she
in a voice that, despite her best efforts, is not steady.
'Why? Oh, I do not know why! because you did.
There! run—run away like a good child, and open the
gate for us.'

Lily complies, and Franky races after her.

Talbot draws a long breath. For a few moments, at all
events, he will have a respite from that terrible catechism.
But from the effects of it he cannot at once sufficiently[Pg 253]
recover to pass into easy speech. Perhaps, too, the sight
of the little Red House—the house that has been built
into so many of his dreams—helps to make him momentarily
dumb.

It is a differently clad Red House from what it was
when last he looked upon it. The Virginia creeper and
the clematis have laid aside their purple and crimson
ardours; and in their place a wistaria is hanging the pale
droop of its long clusters. Lilacs push up their blossoms
against its casements. The ineffable sappy green of spring
everywhere sets and embowers it.

He gives another sigh, a long, low sigh of happiness
this time, and turning, wordless at first, clasps her two
soft hands—hands no longer claimed by any little dimpled
imperative fingers—in his.

She leaves them peaceably to him; but the variations
of her colour from red to white, and back from white to
splendid red, sufficiently tell him that though she is nearly
twenty-three years old, to her a long lover's look, a close
lover's clasp, are unfamiliar things.

His heart bounds at the thought; but at the same
moment is pierced by an arrow of pain. On what an
inequality are they meeting! It is all new to her; while
to him! Oh that he had but God's great gift of erasure!
that he could sponge out from his life those other looks
and clasps! that he could bring to her such eyes, such a
heart, such a hand as she is bringing him!

How, save through his own giving to her, could Lily
Harborough have had the power to poison these, his fairest
moments?

'Will they be here all afternoon?' he asks under his
breath.

'I think it is more than probable,' she answers in the same
key, while right under his eye, over her cheeks, the lovely
carnations and lilies are chasing and dispossessing each other.[Pg 254]

It is part of his punishment, perhaps, that across his
mind, as he looks, there flashes a recollection of Betty's
paint; a comparison that he hates, and that yet he cannot
avoid, between that colour and this. Which is brightest?

'Could not you send them away?'

'Lily would not go,' replies Peggy, with a slight shrug.
'And as for him, poor little fellow, I cannot bear to be
unkind to him, when he is only just out of the jaws of
death. Did you know that he had been at death's door?'

'Yes, I knew,' he answers briefly.

At this reply there comes, or at least it seems to him
that there comes, a tiny cloud over the clear blue heaven
of her eye; and seeing it, he hastens on:

'Is there no place where we can escape from them—where
we can be by ourselves? Oh, Peggy, Peggy! do
you think that I came down from London to talk to Lily
Harborough?'

The cloud stirs a little, but does not altogether remove.

'Did you know that they were here?'

'I! of course not! How should I?'

A passer-by along the road, throwing in a casual glance
between the bars of the gate, gives her a pretext for sliding
her hands out of his. It strikes him that she is over-ready
to avail herself of it.

'Do they ever go to church in the afternoon?' he asks,
catching at this last straw.

A faint ripple of amusement steals over her lips.

'Never.'

She lifts the latch of the door as she speaks, and through
the aperture the sun pours in, making a royal road into
the cool and shaded interior, where he can catch a glimpse
of the birds setting his own ladder aswing; of the Kabyle-pots
full of country posies; of the familiar worn furniture
he had grown last year to think so beautiful. He follows
her with alacrity. It is morally impossible that the chil[Pg 255]dren
can be inside. He is standing once again on the old
Turkey carpet. Here is her sandal-wood workbox, among
whose reels he has seen Franky ravaging. Here is the
chair whose leg he had helped to mend. Here is the
cottage eight-day clock, with the good-humoured moon-face,
which they had all agreed to have a look of milady
peeping over its dial-plate. Here is Mink, civil and
smirking. Here is—herself!

'It is like coming home,' he says softly.

As he speaks a slight noise behind him makes him turn
his head. Can it be Lily again? Lily, with more dreadful
questions, more terrible invitations to draw out of her
armoury of torments? But no! it is not Lily; it is only
Prue. Prue, often a little out of sorts, a little sorry for
herself, rising with the inevitable poetry-book in her hand,
and with a look full of astonishment, from her oak settle
by the fireside. He had forgotten Prue's existence.

'Mr. Talbot!' cries she; 'is it possible? I heard a
man's voice; I could not imagine whose it could be. Are
you staying at the Manor? Is milady back? Is there
any one else there? A party?'

He laughs confusedly. 'I have no connection with
milady.'

'Are you at the Hartleys' then?' (a greatly increased
eagerness); 'do you know the Hartleys?'

'I have not that honour.'

'At the Evanses'? No! impossible! I cannot imagine
any one in their right mind staying at the Evanses'.'

'I do not know whether I am in my right mind, but I
am not at the Evanses'.'

'Where can you be then?'

'I am at the Roupell Arms.'

'The little inn in the village? Not really?'

He makes an affirmative sign. Surely, if the girl is not
a perfect fool, she will understand, she will efface herself,[Pg 256]
she will take herself off, and leave them to themselves, as
Peggy has so often left her and her Freddy to themselves.
But to a person whose whole being is habitually permeated
by one idea, other ideas are slow in penetrating. Prue has
not the least intention of effacing herself. Her curiosity—always,
save on one theme, a languid emotion—satisfied,
she prepares to replace herself on her settle.

'The Roupell Arms!' repeats she; 'what a funny idea!
I never heard of any one staying at the Roupell Arms; I
am afraid you will be very uncomfortable. Peggy, would
you mind covering me again with this shawl? I do not
know what any one else feels, but I feel chilly.'

It is clear that to no member of her household has it
ever occurred to efface herself for Peggy. Presently the
luncheon-bell rings, and the children come bouncing in,
delighted at the prospect of dining without pinafores, and
the consequent opportunity for beslobbering their best
clothes. Talbot's chance of a tête-à-tête seems to be retreating
into a distance to which his eye cannot follow it. But at
least his eye can follow her, as she tries to coax Prue's sickly
palate, as she cuts up Franky's dinner. Into this last
occupation Lily manages to introduce a slight element of
awkwardness.

'When I was little John Talbot used to cut up my
dinner sometimes,' says she narratively—'sometimes he cut
it up, and sometimes mammy did; but before I was as old
as Franky I could cut it myself.'

'You are a very wonderful little girl,' says Talbot
angrily, losing his temper at the consciousness that he is
reddening, 'we all know that; but suppose that we do not
hear any more about you just at present.'

After luncheon they are all dragged out by the children
to see the wonders of the stable-yard. It is true that the
hayloft kittens have, to Franky's surprise, expanded into
sad and sober cats; but this not wholly unexpected meta[Pg 257]morphosis
has not found Alfred unprepared. He has
brought instead, out of his treasure, ferrets new and old;
and to see these interesting animals lift their pale noses
and hands, and their red topaz eyes out of their box,
Talbot has again indefinitely to defer the possession of his
love's sole company. Franky is warmly clasping his hand,
and Lily is hanging heavily on Margaret's arm.

'Lily,' cries Peggy reprovingly, 'how can you be so
rude? You ought never to make personal remarks.'

Lily tosses her head and giggles, and Franky giggles
too, simply because he has a faint delighted sense that he
ought not. There is an atmosphere of rising naughtiness
about them both. Oh that they would but commit some
sin big enough to justify their being sent to bed, or packed
off home in charge of Sarah! But no. They are wily
enough to keep on the hither side of any great iniquity.
They are just naughty enough to prevent attention from
being ever for more than a moment withdrawn from them;
but they avoid incurring any guilt so great as to call down
special vengeance on their heads.

Prue has long ago sauntered back to the settle and her
rhyme-book. But for these imps he would have Peggy all
to himself. He has several times begun eager speeches to
her, which have met with interruptions such as these: 'Do
you think that they can have fallen into the swill-tub?'
'What can they be doing to the parrot to make him swear
so dreadfully?' 'They will pull out poor Minky's tail!'

By the end of an hour, Talbot, genuine child-lover as he
is, is beginning to feel leniently towards Herod the Great.
However, the French proverb says that everything comes
to him who knows how to wait. It may be true, though
some have to carry their waiting into the dark grave with[Pg 258]
them. Talbot has not to carry his quite so far. Just in
time to save him from such an outrage to chivalry as would
be implied by boxing Miss Harborough's ears, appear upon
the scene, though late, yet better than never—gods out of
the machine—the Harborough nurses. They sweep off
both culprits, despite their earnest and sincerely believed-in
asseverations that Miss Lambton wants them to stay all day.
Franky, indeed, is borne away dissolved in bitter tears at
being torn from the friends who, as he honestly thinks,
have been so thoroughly enjoying his society. Franky's
naughtiness is of a wholly imitative character; but his little
warm heart is his own.

Lily, on the other hand, trips away with her head up,
having poured one last stage whisper into Peggy's ear:
'Would it be a personal remark if I were to tell John
Talbot that I think him handsome?'

The object of this flattering inquiry watches the maker
of it with a poignant anxiety, until she, her brother, and
her attendants have turned the corner, and are really and
entirely out of sight. Then he heaves a sigh of profound
relief.

'At last!' he says, sweeping a look round the horizon.

It is quite clear. There is not a living soul in sight.
Being Sunday, not even Jacob. Everything comes to him
who knows how to wait. He has known how to wait, and
now his moment has come.

'Let us sit under the Judas-tree,' he says, and she
acquiescing passively, they turn their steps thither.

But before they have gone three yards, there is a light
foot on the turf behind them. Prue has fled across the
sward from the open window-door, and is whispering something
in Peggy's ear. Almost before he has had time to
feel aghast at this new interruption, she has fled back again.
He looks after her with an irritated inquiry, born of his
long tantalisation.[Pg 259]

'Well, what is it now?' he asks angrily; 'anything
fresh that you are to do or leave undone?'

Peggy reddens.

'It was only that she asked us not to sit under the
Judas-tree; she cannot bear any one to sit there—any one
else.'

'Any one else!' he repeats, his brief and surface wrath
dying away into a smile of passionate happiness; 'any
other lovers, you mean. You may blink the word, Peggy;
but you cannot blink the thing: we are lovers.'

Peggy does not answer. She has sat down on a seat,
above which a great old thorn is just breaking into a foam
of blossom. She has taken up this position in all unconsciousness
of the advantages it presents, but of which
Talbot's eager eye has instant cognisance. The thorn, now
thick with flowers, effectually masks all sitters on that seat
from the view of any eyes darted at them from the house,
the only point whence observation need be dreaded; for
what lover minds the robin's round bright eye, or the
chaffinch's surveillance?

'We are lovers!' he repeats, sitting down resolutely
beside her.

The thorn, leaning as old trees will, projects so far
beyond their heads as to make a natural arbour for them,
and tosses down now and again whiffs of its pungent perfume,
which some strange persons affect to dislike.

'Are we?' she says, the words travelling softly out on
a long sigh. 'You will think me very stupid'—the red
rose of Lancaster for the moment chasing her pale sister
of York out of her face—'but, old as I am—twenty-three
next birthday—I do not know what love—that kind of love—feels
like. I—I—have never had any opportunity of
knowing.'

He stares at her in an enraptured astonishment. For
such a confession as this, his apprenticeship to Betty has[Pg 260]
certainly not prepared him. Can it be conceivable that he
is the first—the very first—to reap the flowers of this
fairest field?

'Do you mean to say,' he inquires, almost with incredulity,
'that you have never given back one small grain
of love to any one of the many men who must have
showered it upon you?'

'But they have not,' returns she, a slight humorous
smile pushing its way through her blushes. 'You are
determined that I have had so many lovers, and I have
had scarcely any. Two or three people have wanted to
marry me—not many. Oh, not at all many! You could
count them on one hand, with several fingers to spare;
and I do not think that they loved me. They did not
give me that impression. They thought I should be a
useful wife, strong and active; but love—love—love,'
repeating the word dreamily—'no,' shaking her head.
'There are not many women of twenty-three who can say
so, I suppose; and I see that you have a difficulty in
believing me; but love has never come near me.'

'And are you resolved that it never shall?' he asks,
under his breath.

She pauses a moment before answering, while her eyes
escape from the tyranny of his, and fix themselves on a
row of tulips, rearing their striped and colour-splashed cups
upon their strong, straight stalks, in the border before her.
With the potent light smiting through them, they look as
if they were cut out of some hard precious stone—sardonyx,
or beryl, or bdellium—goblets to be filled with fairy wine
at the feast of some mage-king.

'I do not know,' she says, with her lips trembling; 'I
am not sure. When I see Prue—when I know that it has
brought all the pain she has suffered—and she has suffered
a good deal—more than you would think, to look at her,
that she could bear—into her life—my one prayer is to[Pg 261]
keep clear of it; and yet—and yet'—with a yearning in
her voice—'one would not like to die having quite missed
it. Oh, tell me'—with a change in her tone to one of
compelling entreaty, bringing back the eyes but now so
sedulously averted from him, and plunging them into his
under the shade of the hawthorn bough—'were you really
speaking truth when you said you had come down from
London only to see me? Are you quite sure—quite—that
that was your real motive?'

'Quite.'

'Nobody would believe it,' she says, with a sort of
wonder in her voice; 'nobody thinks so. They all'—faltering
a little—'they all think something quite different.'

'What does it matter what they think?' he cries hotly,
the colour which unluckily is equally the livery of brazen
guilt and oppressed innocence again mantling his face.
'What have we to do with their blatant suppositions?
Are you going to let them come between us?'

'You will think me very suspicious,' she says tremulously—'very
hard to be convinced of what most women would
find it easy enough to believe—but—but—I care for very
few people,' she goes on, beginning a fresh sentence without
finishing the former one; 'but when I do care, I care very
badly. Do not be angry with me if I say that I have a
sort of dread of caring very badly about you.' If he had
had his will, the conclusion of that sentence would have
found her in his arms; but she holds herself gently aloof.
'If I once let myself love you,' she says, the tears stealing
afresh into her eyes, 'I know that I could never unlove
you again—never while I lived, try as I might; and if
afterwards I found out——'

'Found out what?' breathlessly.

'You know,' she goes on, trying to speak firmly—'I am
sure you must know—that when first I saw you, I had
heard nothing but what was bad of you. That was my[Pg 262]
only excuse for the way in which I behaved to you. I had
heard things about you—no; do not be afraid,' a writhing
motion on his part conveying to her what her words are
making him suffer. 'I am not going to ask you whether
they were true. I have no business with your past; but
what I must ask you—what I shall never have any peace
until I have asked you,' her agitation deepening—'is whether
if people said them now they would still be true?'

There is a moment's stillness before he answers—a
moment long enough for the hawthorn's perfume to be for
ever after wedded in her memory to that pregnant pause.
It is almost in a whisper that she has put her question,
and it is quite in a whisper that his answer comes:

'If they would be true, should I be here now, Peggy?'

She heaves a deep, long sigh, as one off whose heart a
great stone's weight had rolled; and the over-brimming
drops roll soft and hot over her cheeks.

'And will they never be true again?' she asks, still
under her breath; 'are you sure—quite sure of it? I will
believe you if you tell me so. Oh, I want to believe you!
Dog with a bad name as you are,' breaking into an unsteady
laugh—'angry as I was at being sent in to dinner with you—I
want to believe you.'

The south wind brings a jangle of far church bells to
their ears; outside their arbour a starling sits on a tree
with its nose in the air, saying odd, short, harsh things;
and upon this homely music the souls of Talbot and Peggy
on Whit-Sunday float together into love's heaven.

CHAPTER XXVII

'We'll lose ourselves in Venus' Groves of Mirtle, When every little bird shall be a Cupid, And sing of Love and Youth; each wind that blows And curls the velvet leaves shall breathe Delights, The wanton springs shall call us to their Banks, And on the perfum'd Flowers we'll feast our Senses; Yet we'll walk by, untainted of their Pleasures, And, as they were pure Temples, we'll talk in them.'

The shadows have put on their evening length. Even
Minky, as he stands with his little face pushed through the
bars of his gate, barking at the servants as they return
from church—a mere civility on his part, an asking them,
as it were, how they enjoyed the sermon—boasts one that
would not disgrace a greyhound or a giraffe.

'Are you there, Prue?' softly asks a voice, coming out
of the darkening green world outside; coming with an
atmosphere of freshness, of dew, of hawthorn, into the
little hall, and peering toward the fireside-settle, which,
both from the waning light and its own position, hints but
dimly that it has an occupant. 'Are you asleep?'

'I do not know,' replies a disconsolate small treble. 'I
tried to go to sleep, to get over some of the time. Oh
dear, what a long Sunday it has been! Is he gone?'
struggling up into a sitting posture out of her enveloping
shawls.

'How laconic you are!' cries Prue fretfully; 'and I
have not exchanged words with a creature since luncheon.
Do come here; turn your face to the light. What have
you and Mr. Talbot been talking of for the last four hours?
John Talbot, as those horrid children call him. I think
it is so impertinent of them; but I suppose their mother
taught them.'

A slight contraction passes over the radiant, dewy face,
so docilely turned towards the western shining.

'Peggy!' cries the younger girl in an altered tone, forgetting
her invalidhood, and springing off the settle; 'how
odd you look! You do not mean to say—is it possible?
You do not suppose that I do not see—that you can hide
anything from me!'

'There is nothing that I want to hide,' replies Peggy
with dignity, though the blood careers under the pure skin
to cheek, and brow, and lily throat; then, with a sudden
change of tone to utmost tender deprecation, 'Oh, Prue,
you do not mind? You are not vexed? It will not make
any difference to you!'

Prue is silent.

'It will make no difference to you,' repeats Peggy,
rather faltering at the total dumbness in which her
tidings are received. 'Of course you will go on living
with me just as you have always done.'

For all answer, Prue bursts into a passion of tears.

'Oh, do not say so!' she cries vehemently. 'You talk
as if I never were going to have a home of my own! Oh,
it would be too cruel, too cruel!'

Her sobs arrest her utterance. She has collapsed upon
the settle, and sits there a disconsolate heap, with its hands
over its face. Peggy stands beside her; a sudden coldness
slackening the pulsations of her leaping heart.

'You will not care any longer about him and me,'[Pg 265]
pursues Prue weepingly. 'You will have your own
affairs to think of. Oh, I never thought that I should
have to give up you. It was the last thing that ever would
have entered my head. Whatever happened, I always
counted upon having you to fall back upon!'

The dusk is deepening. Peggy still stands motionless
and rigid.

'I know that I am not taking it well,' pursues Prue a
minute later, dropping the fingers wetted with her trickling
tears, and wiping her eyes; while her breath still comes
unevenly, interrupted by sobs. 'I know that I ought to
pretend to be glad; but it is so sudden, such a surprise—he
is such a stranger!'

The cold hand at Peggy's heart seems to intensify its
chill. Is there not some truth in her sister's words? Is
not he indeed a stranger? Has not she been too hasty in
snatching at the great boon of love that has been suddenly
held out to her—she, whose life has not hitherto been
furnished with over-much of love's sweetness?

'I know that you must think me very selfish,' continues
the younger girl, still with that running commentary of
sobs. 'I am selfish, though he says that I am not—that
he never knew any one who had such an instinct of self-abnegation;
but then he always sees the best side of people.
Yes, I am selfish; but I will try to be glad by and by—only,'
with a redoublement of weeping, 'do not expect it of
me to-night.'

And, with this not excessive measure of congratulation,
poor Peggy has to be content, on the night of her betrothal.
She goes to bed with the cold hand still at her heart; but
in the morning it has gone. Who can have a cold hand
still at her heart when she wakes at early morning at lilac-tide,
to find a little round wren, with tiny tail set on
perfectly upright, singing to her from a swaying bough
outside her casement, with a voice big enough for an[Pg 266]
ostrich, and to know that a lover is only waiting for the
sun to be well above the meadows to lift the latch of her
garden-gate.

Before the dew is off the grass they have met. It is
presumable that familiarity with her new position will
come in time to Peggy; but for the present she cannot get
over the extraordinariness of being—instead of anxiously
watching for some one else's tardy lover—going to meet
her own. And when they have met and greeted, the
incredulity, instead of lessening, deepens. Is it conceivable
that it can be her whom any one is so extravagantly glad
to see? All through the day—all through several after-days—the
misty feeling lingers that there must be some
mistake; that it must be some one else; that it cannot be
the workaday Peggy, whom she has always known, who is
being thus unbelievably set on high and done obeisance to.

'Have you told Prue?' asks Talbot, when he has enough
got over the ecstasy of that new morning meeting, to speak
connectedly.

'Yes.'

'And what did she say?'

Margaret hesitates a moment.

'She—she was very much upset.'

'Upset!' repeats Talbot, his tone evidencing the revulsion
of feeling of one who had imagined that all Creation
must be rejoicing with him. 'What was there in it to
upset her?'

'She said it was such a surprise; she was not at all
prepared for it. In that,' blushing, 'she was like me.'

He is silent. It is a mere speck in his heaven; but he
would have liked Prue to have been glad too.

'She said that you are such a stranger,' continues Peggy,
looking half-shyly up at him, with a sort of light veil of
trouble over her limpid eyes. 'When I come to think of
it, so you are; if it were not,' laughing a little, 'that I am[Pg 267]
always hearing the children call you by it, I should not
even know what your Christian name was.'

'A stranger!' repeats Talbot, in a rather dashed voice.

'Never mind; you will not be a stranger long,' returns
Peggy, laughing. 'She will soon grow used to you; and
so' (again with that flitting blush)—'and so shall I. You
must tell me all about yourself,' she goes on, a few moments
later, when, in order to escape from the aggressive din that
Jacob is making with the mowing-machine, as if to assert
his exclusive right to that engine, they have passed beyond
the garden bounds into the green sea of the adjoining
park. 'You must begin at the very beginning; you must
tell me all.'

Is it his fancy that she lays a slight but perceptible
emphasis on that concluding word, which insists on the
entirety of his confession? Whether it be so, or that the
stress exists only in his own imagination, he winces. They
have sat down under a horse-chestnut tree, whose hundreds
of blossom-pyramids point like altar tapers to the fleckless
sky; at their feet the bracken, so tardy to come, so in
haste to go, is beginning to spring and straighten its creases.
Far as the eye can reach, the park's green dips and rises
are flushed with the rose and cream of flowering thorn-bushes.

'Will you?' with a soft persistency.

'Of course I will,' replies Talbot; 'only,' with a laugh
that does not ring quite naturally, 'you do not know what
you are bringing upon yourself. Well, where am I to
begin? At the very beginning?'

'At the very beginning,' repeats she, with a sigh of
satisfaction, settling herself more comfortably with her
back against the tree-trunk to listen. 'Tell me where you
were born, and,' laughing, 'what sort of a baby you were.'

And so he begins at the very beginning; and for a
while goes on glibly enough.[Pg 268]

There are worse occupations for a summer's morning
than to sit on juicy May grass, with the woman you love
beside you; and to read in the variations of her rapt blue
eyes her divine compassion for you. For the you, the
innocent distant you of six, who had the whooping-cough
so badly; her elate pride in the scarcely less distant you of
sixteen, carrying home your school-prizes to your mother;
her tearful sympathy with the nearer you—the you who
still ache at the memory of the loss you sustained when
full manhood had given you your utmost capacity for
feeling it. Up to the date of his sister's death he goes on
swimmingly; but with that date there coincides, or almost
coincides, another. It was during the physical collapse
that followed that crushing blow that Betty, with her
basket of red roses, had first come tripping into his life.
He stops abruptly.

'Well?' she says expectantly, looking towards him, and
wiping the sympathetic tears from her soft eyes.

'Well!' he repeats, with an uneasy laugh. 'Have not
I dosed you with myself enough for one morning? I—I
think that is about all.'

'But that was more than five—nearly six years ago,'
objects she.

'Nearly six years ago,' he echoes, in a tone of almost
astonishment; 'so it was. But—but, as I need not tell
you, the importance of time is not measured by its length;
there are moments that bring an empire, and there are
years that bring nothing, or less than nothing.'

'They cannot have brought nothing,' replies she, her
luminous eyes, in whose pupils he can see himself mirrored
in little, still interrogating his; 'they must have brought
something, good or bad; they must have brought something.'

'You know that there has been no change of Ministry
since then,' he goes on, speaking rather fast, and wincing[Pg 269]
under the steadiness of her look. 'I have been ——'s
secretary ever since—a mere machine, a scribbling machine;
and you know that machines have no history.'

She is silent, and her eyes leave his face, as if it were
useless any longer to explore it. She presses him no
further. It would be both ungenerous and bootless to
urge him to a confession which he would never make, and
in the effort to evade which he would writhe, as he is
doing now. Her breast heaves in a long slow sigh. There
is nothing for it. She must submit to the fact of the
existence for ever, for as long as her own and his being
last, of that five years' abyss between them; an abyss
which, though she may skirt it round, or lightly overskim
it, will none the less ever, ever be there.

There is one subject that, in their moments of closest
confidence, must ever be tabooed to them; one tract of
time across which, indeed, they may stretch their hands,
but which their feet can never together tread; one five
years out of the life of him who should be wholly hers,
locked away from her to all eternity. Her hand has
fallen absently to fondling Minky's poor little gray head,
no bigger than a rabbit's. Minky, who has followed them
to their love-retreat, and has now come simperingly to
offer them his little cut-and-dried remarks upon the fine
day.

Talbot's eye jealously follows that long hand in its
stroking movement. He would like to take it, and lay its
palm across his hot lips. Why should not he? It is his.
But that five years' gulf prevents him. A little milky
blossom with its tiny stain of red, wind-loosened, has
floated down from the horse-chestnut tree, and now rests
upon her hair. He would like to brush it off with a kiss.
Why should not he? Whose but his is now all that blonde
hair? But again the gulf stretches between them.

The sun, steadily soaring zenithwards, sends a warm[Pg 270]
dart through their tree, which, thick-roofed as it is,
is not proof against the vigour of his May strength.
The deer gather for shade under the young-leaved oaks.
The whole earth simmers in the vivifying heat, and yet
they both lightly shiver. Upon Talbot there lies a horrible
fancy, as of Betty sitting between them. It seems to him
as though, if he stretched out his arm to enfold his new
love, it would instead enwrap his old one. Is there no
spell by which he can exorcise this persistent vision?
Will it always be between them? He is still putting this
bitter question to himself, when Peggy speaks:

'Well,' she says, stifling the end of a sigh, and without
any trace of resentment in her tone, 'I am very much
obliged to you for having told me all that you have. I
know that you are not fond of talking of yourself, and if—if'—the
carnation mounting even to her forehead—'there
is anything in your life that you had rather not tell me,
why we—we will let it alone; we—we will not think of
it any more.'

Perhaps her words may contain the spell he has been
praying for; since, in a moment, the Betty phantom has
vanished, and his new sweetheart lies, live and real, in his
arms.

'At all events,' she whispers, 'I can contradict Prue,
next time that she says you are such a perfect stranger.'

She smiles as she speaks. How lovely her smile is,
when he sees it as close as he is doing now! It is not
perhaps quite so radiant as the one with which she met
him at the gate—but her eyes! He lets himself drown—drown
in those heavenly blue lakes. Why should he ever
come to the surface again?

'There they are, Franky!' cries a piercing little voice,
cutting the summer air from a few hundred yards' distance,
'under that horse-chestnut tree; how close together they
are sitting!'[Pg 271]

Another minute has brought the owner of the voice,
and of another voice more lisping and less shrill, up to
their eagerly sought, if not quite so eagerly seeking,
friends.

'You are not sitting so close together as you were,'
chirps Franky innocently. 'Mammy used——'

'What do you want? What have you come for?' asks
Talbot, in a voice a good deal rougher than his little
protégés are apt to hear from him, and breaking into the
middle of a sentence, whose close he can only horrifiedly
conjecture, before more than its two initial words have had
time to leave its small speaker's lips.

At the extreme and unusual want of welcome in his tone,
both children stand for a moment silenced. Then Lily,
with an offended hoist of her shoulders, turns pointedly to
Margaret.

'Nanny says that my tongue is white,' cries she; 'she
is always telling me so. I came to ask you; I thought
that you would not mind telling me,' with an insinuating
air, 'if it really is.'

'And is not mine white too?' inquires Franky eagerly,
and in a minute both red tongues are protruded for inspection;
and Talbot bursts, against his will, into a vexed
laugh.

It is not always, indeed, to have their tongues looked
at; but during the ensuing days of his courtship Talbot
finds that he must hold himself in continual readiness
against onslaughts in unexpected directions from Miss and
Master Harborough, who, finding the little Red House
more amusing than the empty Manor, and being troubled
with no doubts as to their acceptableness, arrive from every
point of the compass at each likeliest and unlikeliest hour
of the summer day. The only thing for which he has to
be thankful is that their arrival is generally heralded by
their eager treble voices; so that he has just time to step[Pg 272]
down out of his seventh heaven before they are upon him.
Perhaps if it were not for this, and for one or two other
slight abatements from its complete felicity, the tuliped
garden, with its lilac breath, its come pansies, and its
coming pinks, would be too like that one when the first he
and she felt the heavenly surprise of their new kisses.

For the children's intrusions are not quite the only
cloud in Talbot's Whitsun sky. It is oftener than once or
twice that the phantom of the past has seated itself between
them. It is oftener than once or twice that he has found
Peggy looking at him in a pained astonishment, at his
having suddenly broken off in the middle of some fond
phrase. She cannot know, and he can never tell her, that
it is because there has suddenly flashed upon him the
recollection, vivid as reality, of some occasion on which he
had showered the same words of fire upon her who has
had precedence over Peggy in his heart. He would fain
cut all such words out of his vocabulary; employ in this
new worship nothing that had been desecrated by having
been offered on the altars of the old. But it is impossible.
He had poured out all his heart's best before the first love.
How then can he have anything fresh for the second?
The thought cuts him like a knife; but none the less, all
the more rather—since it is our knife-thoughts that cling
most pertinaciously to us—does it come back and back
again. In return for all the wealth of her fresh firstfruits,
he has nothing to give her but what is stale, threadbare,
sullied. This is a reflection that would sit easily upon
most men. If it were not so, there would be but few
unembittered love-makings. But upon Talbot's palate it
is wormwood. And lest there should be any chance of his
escaping from his past, there is always some innocent
reminiscence, allusion, or appeal on the part of Lily or
Franky to bring it back to him.

Prue, too! On the blue of his heaven, Prue forms[Pg 273]
another little cloud. Prue makes no pretence of pleasure
in the prospect of his brotherhood; and to Prue he is
sacrificed oftener than he thinks just. It is, thanks to Prue,
that he has so often been sent back prematurely to his pot-house;
that he has had prematurely to break off his trance of
wonder at the eyes, the only blackness under which springs
from some slight and fugitive fatigue; at the cheek, which
his doubting finger may rub as hard as it chooses without
any other result than that of intensifying its damask; at
the hair, from which he has been allowed once to withdraw
the pins in order to convince himself by ocular demonstration
that though it may come down, it can never come off.

'I think you had better go now. She has been alone
all day,' is a formula whose recurrence he has now learnt
to dread.

He shrugs his shoulders.

'I have been alone for thirty-two years.'

'I think if you would not mind going now——'

'I should mind extremely.'

She laughs softly, the happy low laugh of the consciously
well-beloved, rich in the prospect of a whole lifetime of
love ahead.

'Whether you mind it or not, I am afraid you must go.
She had been crying this morning.'

'More shame for her. What has she to cry about?
Now if I were to cry—Peggy, you like her much better
than you do me' (taking her half angrily in his arms).
'Pah!' with a change of tone, perceiving, for the first time,
a gardenia pinned upon the breast of her gown; 'why do
you wear that horrid thing?'

'Franky gave it me. He begged it from the gardener
at the Manor for me.'

'Throw it away!' cries Talbot, with more energy than
the occasion seems to warrant. 'I detest the smell. It is
like a fungus.'[Pg 274]

'It will hurt his feelings if I do.'

'It will hurt mine if you do not,' returns Talbot with
emphasis; and suiting the action to the word, he snatches
the blossom almost violently from her breast, and tosses it
away.

She looks at him, her eyes tinged with a faint surprise.

'What a thing it is to have rival admirers!' she says,
laughing; and then she sends him reluctantly away.

If it were a scheme of the most deep-laid coquetry,
instead of the result of a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice,
she could not have hit upon a better method of inflaming
his passion. All through the long light evening, whose
yellow at this sweetest season is so late in changing to
night's blue, he prowls about outside her garden-fence,
peering between her lilac-clusters and laburnum-droops for
a glint of her white gown; shaking his fist at Prue's selfish
little head, and counting, through the fevered night, the
strokes of the leisurely church clock as they carry him
nearer and nearer to the dewy morning hour, when he may
again hold his red rose of Lancaster in his hungry arms.

And meanwhile his short holiday is racing away.
Scarcely has it seemed to have begun when the end is
already at hand. The date of the reassembling of Parliament,
of his chief's return to Downing Street, and his own
consequent reappearance there, looms nearer and nearer.

To return to Downing Street without her! He has
been without her all his life, and until the last six months
has never looked upon himself as particularly an object of
commiseration on that score; but now his whole soul swells
with a disgusted self-pity at the idea of his lonely return
to his Bury Street lodgings.

He has extracted from Peggy without much difficulty a
promise that his last evening shall be indeed and wholly
his; that for once it shall be Prue, not he, that goes to the
wall; that he shall neither be dismissed to his public-house,[Pg 275]
nor left to disconsolate moonings about the inhospitable
roads and fields, until it is time to betake himself to his
truckle-bed; that, on the contrary, he may for once have
his fill of her fair company, that should by rights be always
his; may sit, and saunter, and sweetly stray with her;
and at length, when the stars ride high, may leisurely bid
'God bless her!' at the garden gate, and dismiss her to
dream of him.

But lovers propose, and freakish chance disposes.

Talbot has returned to his inn to dress for dinner, and
has jumped into his dress-clothes, in miserly grudging of
the moments stolen from his final hours. He had left
Peggy with eager injunctions to be equally quick, so that
a few more moments may be squeezed out before Sarah,
with her clamorous dinner-bell, breaks, with life's loud
prose, into the whispered poetry of their tête-à-tête. And
apparently she has been obedient to his behest, for she is—though
he would have thought it impossible—beforehand
with him, and stands awaiting him, with arms resting on
the top of the gate.

But how is this? She has made no change in her dress,
but is still in her morning cotton.

As he draws near to her she stretches out her hand to
him deprecatingly.

'I hope you will not be very angry!'

A slight chill of apprehension passes over him.

'But I am sure that I shall,' he answers, with a hasty
instinct to ward off the impending blow. 'What is it?
What do you mean? Not,' with an accent of incredulous
indignation, 'Prue again?'

'It is not her fault,' replies Peggy apologetically, and yet
defensively too; 'nobody enjoys being ill. But you know
how finely strung she is; something must have upset her.'

'I am afraid she must have taken a chill,' pursues Peggy,
wrinkling up her forehead into anxious lines. 'I am sure
I do not know how, but I think she must; she has had to
go to bed.'

The young man's brow clears. If Prue's illness involves
only her absence from the dinner-table, he will not very
violently quarrel with it after all.

'Very wise of her,' he says in a lighter voice; 'the best
place for her! Poor Prue!'

'But——,' begins Peggy, whose brow has not smoothed
itself in sympathy with her lover.

'But what?' inquires he sharply, his apprehensions
returning. 'You are not going to tell me that on my last
evening I am to be sacrificed to a malade imaginaire!'

'She is not a malade imaginaire,' answers Margaret half
indignantly; 'her cheeks are as hot as fire, and her pulse
has run up to ninety.'

'I believe she runs it up on purpose. Are you barring
the gate for fear I should force my way in?'

'Oh, no, no!' cries she, hastily dropping her arms from
their resting-place on the top rail, and flinging her portals
hospitably wide. 'Come in! come in! how could you
dream of such a thing? Do you suppose that I am
going to send you away without your dinner? But after
dinner——'

'After dinner?'

'When she is ill, she likes me to sit beside her, bathing
her forehead and her hands. I have always done it, ever
since she was a baby. When you are ill, I will bathe your
forehead and your hands. Oh!' clasping her fingers soft
and fast upon his arm, and looking up with brimful eyes
into his angry face, 'do not look so cross at me! Do not
you think that it is hard enough for me without that?'

CHAPTER XXVIII

The dinner is over—the first tête-à-tête dinner that John
and Peggy have ever shared. To dine tête-à-tête with her
in her own still house, amid her old and homely surroundings,
with the summer evening tossing them in its lavish
perfumes through the wide-opened windows, would have
seemed to him, a month ago, the realisation of his fairest
and most hopeless dream. But in their translation into
the bald language of reality—the jejune prose of fact—our
dreams have a way of losing their finer essence. It has
escaped, without our being able to tell whither or by what
channel. Over both a sort of wet blanket has fallen. Try
as he may, Talbot's temper cannot recover from the poignant
disappointment of his lost last evening; and try as she may—broken
in, as she is, by a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice—Peggy
cannot hinder the lump from rising in her throat,
and the tears from crowding into her eyes, at the reflection
that her own hand has cut off, and flung away, the blossoms
of these final crowning hours. How many things she had
saved to say to him on this last evening—things too tender
for her shamefacedness to utter, save under the justification
of an imminent severance—things that he would have liked
to have heard all through these days, but that she had laid
up in the storehouse of her heart as too close and sacred
for aught but to sweeten their parting! How can she say
them now across a dinner-table, with Sarah coming out and
in, Prue sending peevish messages to her, a score of trivial[Pg 278]
interruptions forbidding any but the most banal talk? It
was only with her head on her love's breast, in the dusk of
the starshine, that she could ever have found courage to
utter them. When will they be uttered now? The present,
the brave solid present, is our own, to caress or misuse;
but who dares say to the future, that formless form wrapped
in uncertain gray, 'Thou art mine'?

And now the dinner is over, and they have separated,
with spurious coldness. Peggy has vanished upstairs to
her sister, and Talbot is left to employ the hours of his last
evening as he best may. It is true that Margaret has
eagerly begged him to take possession of house and garden,
and has held out tearful hopes of snatching here and there
a moment from Prue's sick exactions to give him. But his
ireful restlessness will not allow him to accept this concession.
It would be worse to be within apparent reach of
her, yet just beyond her eye and touch, than to be quite
outside her domain. He tells her so, half harshly; and
opening the gate into the park, takes himself and his ill-temper
to the oaks and the deer for consolation.

At first he walks along over the dew-freshened sward,
under the isolated oak giants, or between the more gregarious
beeches and limes of spinny and copse, without
seeing them. He has no eyes, save those angry inward
ones that are turned upon his own disappointment. His
last evening!—his last evening! If it had been any but
the last! Henceforth, in retrospect, this holiday of his will
take all its colour from this bitter last evening. It is the
end that stamps anything as bad or good. Oh, cruel
Peggy! He has had so few really good hours in his life;
and now she has ruthlessly robbed him of his best. And
for what?

With the answer which he is compelled to give himself
to this question comes his first dawn of consolation.
Certainly to no personal gratification has she sacrificed him.[Pg 279]
He can hardly, in his most aggrieved moments, picture her
as better amused than himself as she stoops—with the tears
called up by his ill-tempered words scarcely dried upon her
cheek—over her equally ill-tempered invalid, bathing her
forehead, holding her jealous hands.

Poor Peggy! He will go back at once, and beg her
pardon. But no. The consciousness of his being hanging
wrathfully about will only further complicate her difficulties.
He will take a lesson out of her book, and efface himself
wholly for this one evening, even though it is the last.
The last in one sense, but in another——?

He has sat down on a felled trunk, stripped of its
branches, but not yet removed by the wood-cutter's cart.
The hawthorn comes in âcre whiffs to him. His heart,
though he is alone for the whole evening—though he will
probably have to go back to his alehouse without one more
glimpse of her damask-textured face, gives a great bound.
The last? For him and her there will be no last evening
until—for God, who has given him so much, will surely
give him, too, the supreme boon to die first—until, bending
over him as she now bends over Prue, her voice and her
hands smooth his passage to the easy grave.

The revulsion of feeling from his earlier ill-humour,
produced by this thought, brings the moisture to his eyes.
What is this parting in comparison with that six-months-ago
one—when he had taken leave of her with no rational
hope of ever having his eyes enriched by her again—when
he had been afraid to trust his tongue to any speech, lest it
should drift into tendernesses he had believed for ever
prohibited to it? That parting in the walled garden!
Why should not he go thither now, so that, surrounded by
the mute witnesses of his former despair, he may the better
gauge the extent of his new felicity? The idea, once conceived,
approves itself so instantly to his imagination that
he starts up; and, exchanging his former purposeless[Pg 280]
saunter for a quick walk, sets off in the direction of the
Manor gardens.

The evening is falling, in late May's best serenity,
weighted with the innocent sweetness of country odours.
The deer—their mottled sides growing indistinct—are
browsing wakefully among the bracken. The throstles
have reached their song's last verse.

He has gained the pleasure-grounds, just as the vanguard
of the stars take possession of the emptied sky. He
hastens along, almost as hurriedly as if it were to a rendezvous
with the real Peggy, instead of with the six-months-old
memory of her, that he were speeding; between the
burnished laurels; past the fresh-blown splendours of the
great rhododendron-beds, on fire with red, and pale with
cream and blush and lilac; narcissus and may taking his
nostrils by storm as he brushes past them to his goal, the
still walled garden.

As he nears it, a misgiving seizes him that he may perhaps
find himself locked out—that he may perhaps have to
content himself with the mutilated satisfaction of peering
in at it, between the wrought iron of its gate; and it is
with a trepidating hand that, standing at last before it, he
tries the handle with fingers not very confident of success.
But for the first time to-night Fate is kind to him. The
gate yields to his touch; and pushing it, he walks in. He
has not been inside the enclosure's quiet precincts since the
night of that parting, whose bitterness he has now come, in
the wantonness of his new joy, purposely to revive. He
must indeed be happy that goes, of his own accord, courting
a dead misery. He draws a long luxurious breath, as he
looks round in search of the landmarks of that past woe.
They are here, but they wear a changed aspect. Through
the wrought-iron railing, indeed, the church tower and the
yews, its brothers in age and gentle gravity, still rise in the
friendly dusk; but another race of flowers has sprung in[Pg 281]
the place of those that witnessed his despair. The ghostly
white gladioli are gone, and the autumn-faced asters. The
winter winds have dispersed the down of the traveller's joy;
and the penetrating breath of the mignonette has long ago
died off the air. But in their place another nation has
arisen; a better, he says to himself, as he stands with all
spring's scented hopefulness crowded about his feet.

He walks slowly along, seeking to recover the exact
spot where that parting had taken place; seeking to
recover it by the aid of the small landmarks that bear
upon it. There had been a moon, a section of a moon,
to light it. There is none now.

He is glad. She has been the accomplice of half the
world's crimes. He wishes that the outward conditions
should be as altogether changed as the inward ones. He
is glad that the trees, then wrapped in the heavy uniformity
of late summer, are now showing the juicy variety
of their early leafage. He is glad that the creepers are in
bud, instead of in lavish flower; glad of the fresher quality
of the light air; glad of anything that marks the fact that
that bad old night has gone, and this good young new one
come. For so changed is his mood since the time that he
set off from the Red House gate, that his evening, though
spent in solitude, does seem eminently good to him, and
his heart bounds with almost as high an elation as if she
were pacing beside him in the starlight, with her head on
his shoulder, as she will do in the future, many hundred
happy times.

He has paused in his walk. It was here that she stood—just
here. He knows the exact spot, by a comparison
of the distance from the long bed of violets, which, alone
unchanged of all the flowers, still stretches beneath the
south wall, and mingles its odours with that of the new-come
flowers, as it had done with the departed ones.
Just here! And he himself had stood here. She had[Pg 282]
been facing the gate, and he with his back to it. Thus,
thus. The little crafty half-moon had shone into her eyes,
as she made him her last wistful speech:

'Since you are so determined to go downhill, I suppose
that I dare not say I hope our roads will ever cross again.'

Six months ago, only six months between the moment
when he had in dumb hopelessness acquiesced in the fact
that their paths must for ever diverge, and this in which
they are, for all eternity, merged in one. His eyes have
dropped to the gravel, as if seeking the print of her dear
feet, that he may stoop and kiss it. His back is, as on
that former occasion that his imagination has so potently
summoned from its grave, turned towards the gate. He
is alone. There are no witnesses to make him ridiculous.
Why may not he be as foolish as he pleases? He has
actually dropped on his knees, and is stooping his lips
towards the pebbles, which may or may not be the very
ones her light step pressed half a year ago, when the sound
of the click of a latch behind him makes him raise his head
and spring to his feet. Who, at this late hour of the
evening, can be turning the handle of the gate? Who but
one? She has forsaken Prue for him after all. Love's
instinct has told her the path he took; and here, on the
spot where he had for ever renounced her, she has come
to him under the stars. What welcome can he give her
that will be thankful and joyful enough for such an unlooked-for
grace? He turns—his whole face alight with
ecstasy—towards her, but his feet do not move to meet
her.

By a refinement of love's cunning he will await her
here; and, on the very foot of ground that witnessed their
separation, he will receive her into his arms again. She
has pushed the gate now, and, like himself, she is within
the enclosure; her white gown (he has often praised her in
white, and she must have put it on since he left her)[Pg 283]
flitting like a snow-winged dove, along the dusky walk
towards him.

'What an odd place you have chosen to say your
prayers in!' cries a high-pitched voice.

'Betty!' For, by one of Fate's juggles, it is the old
and not the new love to whom his radiant greeting is
addressed. It is the old and not the new love whom, if
his arms clasp any woman under the stars to-night, they
must enfold. They do not, indeed, show much readiness
to do so. They hang as if palsy-struck at his sides, while
his voice repeats in a horrified whisper that he would fain,
if he could, make one of incredulity, 'Betty!'

'Do not trouble yourself to repeat it a third time,' says
she, with a flighty laugh that has yet no tinge of mirth in
it. 'I do not need convincing that I am I, nor need you.'

'You here?'

'I may return the compliment—you here?'

He is staring at her with wide, shocked eyes that are
also full of an astonishment he is powerless to master. Is
this the Betty he had parted from on that awful Christmas
morning? this the wretched woman, clammy-handed, dishevelled,
reckless of all save her own mastering agony, who—her
haggard mother-eyes unable to attain the boon of
any tears—had hoarsely forbidden him her presence for
ever? Can this be she—this hovering vision of lace and
gauze—that has floated towards him on the wings of the
night, and now lifts to his, eyes that in this light look as
clear as Peggy's—cheeks whose carnations seem no less
lovely and real? Before his confused consciousness, the
two visions—of that Betty and of this—inextricably entangled,
and yet irrevocably separated, pass and repass;
and he continues standing, wordlessly, stupidly staring,
in a horror and a wonder that are beyond the weight of
his volition to conquer, at the woman before him.

After her last sentence she is wordless too, and also[Pg 284]
stands looking at him, mute and full, as if she had forgotten
his face, and were learning it off by heart again,
her factitious gaiety for the moment died down and gone in
the silent starlight. It is he who first speaks.

'You—you came here to see your children?'

'To see my children?' repeats she. 'Ha! ha! Yes,
that was the reason I gave at home; and a very pretty
and laudable one too, was not it? To see my children!
But, as it happens, a woman has often more than one
reason. I had more than one.'

She has lapsed into her flippant gaiety again, and now
pauses as if expecting him to inquire into the nature of
the other reason to which she alludes; but if so, he does
not gratify her. He is still fighting with the horror of
that double consciousness. Can this be the woman to
whom in that icy winter dawning his whole soul had gone
out in such an overpowering passion of pity? And if it
be indeed she, has she clean forgotten the sacred agony of
their last farewell? Her laugh is still dissonantly jarring
on his stunned ear, when, finding it hopeless any longer to
wait for questioning on his part, she resumes:

'It is always well to kill two birds with one stone—is
not it?' says she, looking hardily into his eyes. 'Pardon
the homeliness of the expression! You know that reports
reach even quiet places—Harborough, for instance. Well,
such a report—a canard probably, but still there was
something oddly circumstantial about it—was spreading
there yesterday about a—person—I—used—to know—rather
well—have some interest in—in fact——'

She pauses again; her words have, for the last half of
her speech, come draggingly, with a little break between
each, and not for one instant does her eye release him.
But again he makes no comment. Her breath is coming
perceptibly quicker when she next takes up her theme.

'You do not ask what the report was? No? I fear[Pg 285]
my little tale does not interest you. It would perhaps be
civiller on your part if you could pretend that it did;
perhaps you will think that it improves as it goes on.
Well, the subject of the report is a man; and the report
itself—do not you think that it was the simplest plan on
my part to come and verify it in person?—is that he is
going to take to his bosom a—ha! ha! I never can help
laughing when I think of it—a—guess! No; you would
never guess—a sack of pota——'

'Do not call her names,' says Talbot, for the first time
finding his voice, and stretching out his hands, but now
hanging so nervelessly at his sides, in authoritative wrathful
prohibition; 'do not dare to call her names!'

'Then it is true?'

Her laugh, little kin as it had ever had with real
merriment, is dead—strangled in her throbbing throat;
and she puts up her hand as if she were choking.

'Until you can speak of her with the respect that is her
due, I will answer no questions,' he replies sternly.

The next moment he sees her stagger in the starlight,
and his heart smites him for his cruelty. He makes a
hasty movement towards her, thinking that she is going to
fall; but before he can reach her she has steadied herself,
and faces him, livid, it is true, under her paint, but firm
and collected beneath the stars. She has even recovered
her laugh.

'Thank you,' she says, in a low but distinct voice, 'for
the information that you have incidentally given me, even
though you refused to let me have it direct. I have no
further occasion to trouble you, and need only offer you
my congratulations and my hopes that you and your bride
will meet with some one to sweeten your married lives as
you have sweetened mine.'

So saying, she turns to leave him. If he were wise he
would let her go—would set no hindrance in her way; but[Pg 286]
which of us, in the crucial moment of our lives, is wise?
Before his reason can arrest him, following only the impulse
that forbids him to let the woman who for five years had
sat crowned and sceptred in his heart thus leave him, he
makes two hasty steps after her.

'Betty!'

At the sound of his voice, there comes a sort of wavering;
but she does not stop or turn her head.

'Betty!' he repeats, overtaking her, and preventing her
egress by setting his back against the wrought-iron gate;
'after all that has come and gone, are we to part like
this?'

'How else do you wish us to part?' she inquires in a
steely voice of the bitterest irony, while her eyes glitter,
but not with tears; 'do you expect me to dance at your
wedding?'

'There is no reason why you should not,' he answers
firmly, looking steadily back at her. 'I have done you no
wrong. Have you forgotten how, and with what solemnity,
you sent me away from you for ever?'

'So I did,' cries she, breaking into a hard laugh. 'Do
not tell any of my friends, or I should never hear the last
of it. What an accès of superstition I had that cold
morning! I will do myself the justice to say, the first and
last of its kind. I thought to save Franky by renouncing
you, was not that it? If I had known how little there was
to renounce, I might have spared myself the pains, might
not I?—ha! ha!'

Again her merriment rings harshly on the soft air, and
he can find no word of rejoinder.

'How you must have been laughing in your sleeve!'
pursues she, still with that arid, withering mirth. 'Though
the joke is against me, I cannot help laughing at myself
when I think of it.'

'I looked so like laughing in my sleeve, did not I?' he
asks, panting, and in a voice which emotion of the most
painful quality he has ever felt renders indistinct.

'No one would believe it,' she goes on, unheeding,
apparently unaware of his interruption, 'of a woman of my
age, and who, as they say, has lived every minute of her
life—I have done that, have not I? But it is nevertheless
Gospel truth that I was such a greenhorn as to be almost
as sorry for you as I was for myself. I suppose,' with a
sort of break in her dry voice, 'one gets into a stupid habit
of thinking one's self indispensable!'

She pauses, and making no further effort to depart,
stands silent, with set teeth and hands that unconsciously
twist and tear the slight lace pocket-handkerchief between
her fingers.

What can he say to her? By what words—save words
of entreaty to her to put again the chain about his neck
and the fetters upon his limbs—can he appease or comfort
her? And sooner than utter such words, he would fall
dead at her feet.

'Wretched superstition!' she says between her teeth,
still rending the morsel of lawn in her fingers; 'how could
I, of all people, have been such a fool as to be conquered
by it? What did it matter to the Powers above—what
did they care whether I kept or threw away the one
miserable bit of consolation I had in my hideous life?
The child would have got well all the same, while I—I—but
perhaps' (her tone changing to one of alert suspicion),
'perhaps even then you had come to an understanding,
you and she. Perhaps even then you were hoodwinking
me. I was so easy to hoodwink—I, of all people, who
had always thought myself so wide awake—ha! ha!'

Again that dreadful laugh assails his ear, and makes
him shiver as if it were December's blasts that were
biting, not May's breezes kissing his cheek.[Pg 288]

'I never hoodwinked you!' he answers, in an agitation
hardly inferior to her own; 'it was always plain-sailing
between us. I went away because you sent me.'

'And you took me at my word?' cries she wildly.
'Yes, I know that then, at that moment, I meant you to
take me at it; but I was out of my mind. Hundreds of
people less mad than I was then are in Bedlam. You
might as well have listened to the ravings of a lunatic as
to mine that day; and—you—took—me—at—my word!'

Her speech, which in its beginning was shrill and rapid,
ends almost in a whisper.

'The wish was father to the thought,' she says, again
breaking into that laugh which jars upon him far more
than would any tears or revilings; 'you believed it because
you wished it. I showed you a handsome way out of your
dilemma. I played into your hands. Without knowing
it—oh, I think that you will believe it was without knowing
it—I played into your hands. Without hurting my feelings—without
quite giving the lie to all your glib vows—without
any disagreeable shuffling—you were free! I set
you free! I! Oh, the humour of it! I wonder how you
could have kept any decent countenance that morning!
and I—I—never saw it. Oh, I must have been blinder
than any mole or bat not to have seen it, but I did not!'

She pauses, as if suffocated; but in a moment or two
has recovered breath and composure enough to resume:

'And I was sorry for you. I do not know why I have
a pleasure in showing up my own folly to you; but, as
you say, it has always been plain-sailing between us, and
one does not easily shake off an old habit. Yes, sorry for
you! Not at first. At first I could think of nothing but
him; but he took a turn for the better very soon—God
bless him! As long as he was only getting well, it was[Pg 289]
enough for me to think that I had him back—oh, quite
enough!' some tears stealing, for the first time, into her
scorching eyes; 'but when he was on his legs again, and
everything going on as usual, then I began to see what I
had done.'

Her voice has sunk to a low, lagging key of utter
dispiritedness.

'You never sent for me; you never wrote to me,' says
Talbot hoarsely.

'Did you expect it?' she cries, a sudden eager light
breaking all over her face. 'Were you waiting for me to
write? Did you watch the post for a letter from me?
Oh, if I had only known! Did you—did you?'

She has laid her hand convulsively on his coat-sleeve, and
is looking up, with all her miserable soul in her eyes, into
his face. What can he answer? He had watched the
post indeed; but with how different a motive from that
with which her passionate hopes have credited him!

'No! I see that you did not,' she says, dropping her
hand from his arm with a gesture of disgust, as if she had
touched a snake, a horrible revulsion of feeling darkening
all her features; 'or, if you did, it was with dread that I
should make some effort to get you back. At every post
that came in, without bringing you a specimen of my
handwriting, you drew a long breath, and said: "It is
incredible! I could not have believed it of her; but she
has let me go, really!" Come, now,' with a spurious air
of gaiety, in ghastly contrast with her drawn features and
burning eyes, 'you were always such an advocate for truth;
you used to be so severe upon my little harmless falsehoods.
Truth! truth! Let us have the truth!'

'Have it, then!' he says desperately, stretching out his
arms towards her, as if transferring from his keeping to
hers the weight of that murderous confession. 'I was glad!'

Again, as once before, she reels, as though it were some[Pg 290]
heavy physical blow that he had struck her; and again
his heart smites him.

'I—I—thought that we had both come to our right
minds,' he says, stammering, and seeking vainly for words
that will soften the edge of that bitter sword-thrust, and
yet not incur the deeper cruelty of bringing again that
illusory radiance over her face; 'I—I—thought we might
begin our lives again—different, better! We had been
most unhappy!'

'Unhappy!' she repeats, in a voice that, if he did not
with his own eyes see the words issuing from her lips, he
could never have believed to be hers—'unhappy! Are
you telling me that you were unhappy all my five years?
Has she made you believe even this?' She stops, and
fixes her glittering look upon him with an expression so
withering that he involuntarily turns his away with a
sensation as of one scorched. 'No!' she continues, her
voice rising, and growing in clearness as she goes on; 'she
may persuade herself of that—what do I care what she
persuades herself of?—but she will never really persuade
you. No! no! no!' a ring of triumph mixing with the
exceeding bitterness of her tones. 'There is one superiority
that I shall always, to all eternity, have over her; one
that neither she nor you, do what you will, can ever rob
me of: I shall always—always have been first! There is
nothing you can give her that will not be second-hand!'

He has clenched his hands in his misery till the finger-nails
bite the palms. Is not this the very reflection that
has been mingling its drop of earth's gall with the honeyed
sweetness of his heaven?

'Yes!' he says, panting; 'do I deny it? I can never
give any one better love than I gave you.'

'Gave!' she repeats, her voice dropping again to a husky
whisper, and casting her parched eyes up to heaven, as
if calling on the stilly constellations to be witness to her[Pg 291]
great woe—'gave! He himself said gave! And I am
alive after hearing it. Oh, poor I!'

Her voice shudders away in a sigh of intense self-pity;
and she hurriedly covers her face with her hands as if to
shut out the view of her own fate, as too hideous to be
looked upon with sanity; while long, dry sobs shake her
from head to foot. The sight of her anguish is more than
Talbot can bear. Two steps bring him to her side; and
before he can realise what he is doing, he has taken her
two hands and drawn them forcibly away from her face.

'Betty!'

'Well!' she says dully, leaving them in his, as if it no
longer mattered where, or in whose keeping, they lay;
'what about Betty?'

'I wish I could!' rejoins she fiercely. 'I wish to
heavens I could! But I must leave that to her. Tell me
about her!' changing her tone to one of factitious temperate
interest. 'She is a good soul, I am told; bonne comme
du pain. There is nothing so pleasant as complete change,
is there? How does she show her goodness, by the bye?
Does she say her prayers every night, and make a flannel
petticoat for the poor every day, eh?'

He attempts no answer to her gibes; only, in his intense
and mistakenly shown compassion, he still holds her hands,
and looks down, with a pity beyond speech's plummet-line
to sound, into the eyes whose beauty he has long ceased to
see, but whose agony has still power to stab him.

'I suppose,' she goes on, her mood changing—it is never
the same for two minutes together, and her mockery giving
way to a tone of condensed resentful wretchedness—'that
if I loved you properly, as people love in books, I should
be glad to see you march off triumphantly, with drums
beating and colours flying, to be happy ever after; but I[Pg 292]
am not! I tell you fairly I am not! If I had my will you
should be as miserable—no, that you never could be; I
would let you off with less than that—as I am!'

He looks at her sadly.

'Even if I were so happy as you fear, a couple of hours
ago, I think you have cured me of it.'

'You used to be a kind-hearted man,' she says, scanning,
as if in dispassionate search, his sorrowful features; 'perhaps
you are still, if happiness has not hardened your heart.
It does harden the heart sometimes, they tell me; it is a
long time since I have had a chance of judging by experience.
But, if you are, try not to let me hear much of your
happiness—try to keep it as quiet as you can.'

Her last words are almost inaudible through the excess
of the emotion that has dictated them.

'Perhaps you will have your wish,' he says gloomily,
for the last half-hour seems to have shaken all the fabric of
his prospective Elysium; 'perhaps there will not be much
to hide.'

'That is a very civil suggestion on your part,' she
answers, relapsing into biting sarcasm; 'so likely, too.
Go on. I am cheered already: find out some more equally
probable topics of consolation for me. Why do not you
remind me that I still have my husband—my husband
whose society you have taught me so much to enjoy; my
visiting-book; my—my——'

'You have your boy,' he interrupts sternly, goaded into
anger out of compassion by her tone.

Her hands drop from his, and a light shiver runs over
her shuddering body.

'I—have—my—boy,' she repeats slowly; 'so I have.
God forgive me for having even for one moment forgotten
him! Yes, I have him—bless him! but for how long?
Even if he lives—oh, he will live! God cannot take him
too from me—I was a fool ever to fear it; but even if he[Pg 293]
lives to grow up, he too will go from me. People will
tell him things about me; or if they do not tell him, he
will pick up hints. I shall see it in his eyes, and then he—too—will—go—from
me!' breaking into a long moaning
sob. 'I suppose,' looking in utter revolt up to heaven,
'that They will be satisfied then. I shall have nothing—nothing—NOTHING
left!'

She has broken into a storm of frantic tears, that rain
from her eyes and career unheeded down her white gown.
He can only look on miserably.

'But at least,' she says deliriously, every word marking
a higher stage in the rising sea of her frenzy, 'I shall
always have been first! Neither you nor she can take that
from me. It may make you both mad to think so, but you
cannot. I shall always—always have been there first.
You may tell her so from me, if you like,' with one last burst
of dreadful laughter; 'it will be no breach of confidence, for
I give you leave.'

Then, in a moment, before he can divine her intention,
or—even if he had the heart to do so—arrest her, she has
flung her arms convulsively about his neck; and in a
moment more she is gone, leaving him there dazed and
staggering in the starlight, with the agony of her good-bye
kiss on his lips, and his face wet with her scorching tears.

CHAPTER XXIX

If there is one hour of the day at which the little Red
House looks conspicuously better than another, it is that
young one when the garden grass is still wet to the
travelling foot, and the great fire-rose in the east has not
yet soared high enough to swallow the shadows. So Talbot
thinks, as he takes his way next morning to his love's little
russet-coloured home. She has promised over-night to rise
betimes, to give him an early tryst before he sets off on his
dusty journey back into the world without her. He is of
course by much too early; and though he tries to hasten
the passage of time by looking at his watch every two
minutes, yet he is compelled, if he would not be at her
door long before it is opened to him, to journey towards
her at a very different rate from that at which his heart is
doing. He walks along, drawing in refreshment of soul
and body with every breath. He has not slept all night,
and his eyes are dry and feverish; but the air, moist with
the tears of the dawn, beats his lids with its soft pinions,
and all the lovely common sights of early morning touch
healingly upon his bruised brain, and heart still jarred and
aching with the ignoble pain of that late encounter.

At every step he takes some sweet or gently harmonious
sight or sound steals away a parcel of that ugly ache, and
gives him an atom of pure joy instead. Now it is a stray
wood-pigeon beginning its day-long sweethearting in the
copse. Now it is a merry din of quiring finches, all talking[Pg 295]
together. Now it is a glimpse of a sprinkle of cowslips in
an old pasture, shaking off their drowsiness. Now it is only
a stout thrush lustily banging its morning snail against a
stone, the one instance of gross cruelty amongst the many
that the scheme of nature offers, which the most tender-hearted
cannot fail to admire. And now a turn of the
road has given him to view her house, and the tears,
cleansing as those of the morning, leap to his eyes at the
sight of it. Dear little wholesome, innocent house, giving
back the sun's smile from each one of its shining panes;
giving it back, as her mirroring face will give back his own
love-look, when she comes—so soon now, oh, so soon!—across
the dew-drunk daisies to his arms. With what a
feeling of homecoming does his heart embrace it—he that,
for so many arid years, has had no better home than Bury
Street lodgings, or Betty's boudoir!

He looks eagerly to see whether, by some blessed accident,
she may even now be ahead of him in time, awaiting him
with sunshiny face uplifted, and firm, fair arms resting on
the top-rail of the gate. He knows how early she rises,
and that no coquettish punctilio as to being first at the
rendezvous will hinder her, if she is sooner ready than he.
But apparently to-day she is not. There is no trace of
her.

A slight misgiving as to Prue's illness, which until this
moment he had indignantly dismissed from his memory as
imaginary, having a more serious character than he had
credited it with, makes him glance apprehensively towards
the young girl's casement. The blind is down, it is true;
but over all the rest of the house there is such a cheerful
air of everyday serenity, that, considering the earliness
of the hour, he cannot attach much importance to the
circumstance.

Prue is always—how unlike his fresh Peggy!—a lie-a-bed.
Mink and the cat are standing airing themselves on[Pg 296]
the door-step, and, by the suavity of their manner, obviously
invite him to enter.

The hall-door is open, and he passes through it. It is
the first time that he has had to push uninvited into her
sanctuary—the first day that she has not met him at the
gate. He checks the rising chill that the reflection calls
forth, and hurries on into the hall; meaning to hurry
through it, for surely it will be in the garden that he will
find her. Perhaps, by one of love's subtilties, she has
chosen to bid him farewell under the very hawthorn-tree
where he had first called her his. But he has not made
two steps into the hall before he discovers that his calculations
have erred. Can it be by another of love's subtilties
that she is sitting here indoors, away from the morning's
radiance, sitting quite idle apparently by the table; and
that, on his entry, she does not even turn her head?

'Peggy!' he cries, thinking that she cannot have heard
his step, though it has rung not more noiselessly than usual
on the old oak boards; and that Mink, with a friendly
afterthought, is firing off little shrill 'good mornings' at
his heels.

There is no change of posture in the sitting figure, no
movement, unless, if his eyes do not deceive him, a slight
shiver running over it.

'Peggy!' he repeats, alarmed; and, in a second, has
overleaped the intervening distance—has fallen on his
knees at her feet, and grasped her hands. 'What is it?
Quick—speak to me! Is Prue worse?'

There is no answer. She has averted her face, so that
he can see only the outline of her cheek's oval, at his
approach; and—what is this? She is drawing her hands
with slow decision, not with any petulance or coquetry, but
as one irrevocably resolved, out of his. Then she rises
slowly to her feet, and, having put three paces between
them, turns and looks full at him. Looks full at him, this[Pg 297]
tall, risen woman, who will not lend him the custody of
her hand! But who is she—this woman? Not his Peggy!
Nay, surely not his Peggy! His Peggy, cheeked like the
dawn, with eyes made out of sapphires and morning dew—his
kindly, loving Peggy—what has she in common with
this pale austerity that is facing him?

'What is it?' he repeats huskily, a vague horror making
his knees knock together; 'is she——'

He breaks off. The idea has flashed across him that
Prue is dead! What lesser catastrophe can account for
this horrible unnamed change?

'She is better,' replies Peggy hoarsely.

'Better!—thank God for that!' drawing a long breath
of relief. 'What do you mean by looking like this? You
made me think—I do not know what; but,' his agony of
perplexity returning in profounder flood, 'if so—if she is
better, what is it?—what else? For mercy's sake answer
me!—answer me quickly! Do not keep me waiting! You
do not know what it is to be kept waiting like this!'

He has risen from his kneeling attitude; but that
unaccountable something in her face hinders him from
making any effort to bridge the distance she has set between
them. Across that distance comes her reply, in a
voice that seems to set her continents and seas away from
him:

'Are you—quite—sure—that—I—need answer you?'

'Sure that you need answer me?' repeats he bewildered,
struggling against the ice that is sweeping up over his
heart; 'why, of course I am! Why else should I have
asked you? We must be playing at cross-purposes,' with
an attempted smile. 'Of course I am sure!'—reading the
disbelief in her white face—'quite sure! What can I say
to asseverate it? As sure as that I stand here—as sure
as——'

'Oh, stop!—stop!' she cries vehemently, thrusting out[Pg 298]
her hands towards him as if in passionate prohibition, while
a surge of colour coming into her face restores her to some
likeness to his Peggy; 'do not—do not let me have to
think that I have been the cause of your telling any more
falsehoods!'

'Any more?' echoes he, putting up his hand to his forehead,
and feeling as if she had struck him across the eyes.

'Yes,' she says, gasping, while he sees her hand go out
in unconscious quest of the table-edge, as if to steady
herself. 'Yes!—do not I speak plainly? Any more!'

Again he passes his hand over that brow that feels cut
and furrowed by the lash of her words.

'You—must—explain,' he says slowly; 'apparently I
am dull this morning. What other falsehoods have I told
you?'

Both her hands are clutching the table now; nor is its
support unneeded, for her body sways. Only for a moment,
however. In a moment she is standing firm again.

'What other?' she repeats, half under her breath;
'what other? Oh!' with a long shuddering groan, 'how
many, many you must have told before you could grow to
do it with a face that looks so like truth!'

But at that the insulted manhood of him awakes, goaded
into life, and shakes off the paralysis engendered by his
horrible astonishment.

'Come!' he exclaims, disregarding her unspoken veto,
going close up to her and standing before her, with folded arms
and flashing eyes; 'this is intolerable!—this is more than
man can bear! Let me hear what you have to say—speak
your accusation; but do not tell me to my face that I am
a liar, without bringing a rag of evidence to support it!'

She looks back at him, taking in, with a startled air, his
changed demeanour—the command of his attitude—the
authority of his eyes. Then—

'You—are—right,' she says, panting, while he sees her[Pg 299]
poor heart miserably leap under the pink cotton gown he
had praised yesterday—was it yesterday, or before Noah's
flood? 'I—have no right to bring vague accusations, as
you say. Will you—will you—let me wait a minute?'

She sinks upon a chair as she speaks; and, resting her
elbow upon the table, passes her pocket-handkerchief once
or twice over her face, wiping away the cold drops of
anguish that, despite the morning's radiant warmth, are
gathering upon it. He waits beside her, in a black suspense,
pushing away from him the fear that he refuses to formulate.

'There!' she says, after a year's interval, which the
clock falsely calls sixty seconds; 'I—I—beg your pardon
for keeping you waiting.' She has banished, as far as she
can, all signs of emotion, and begins in a level low voice.
'Prue got better almost immediately after you went away
last night—was it really only last night?' with a bewildered
look; then, immediately recovering herself, 'so decidedly
better, that I thought I might safely leave her.' She
pauses. 'I—I—thought I—I—would follow you.'

Another pause. It is evidently killing work to get on
at all. Angry as he is with her, clearly as he now sees
what is coming, he cannot help a compassionate wish to
help her, and make it easier for her.

'I—did not know which way you had gone,' she resumes,
after another battle with herself; 'no one had seen you.
But I thought—I guessed—I fancied that it might have
been to the walled garden, because—because we had—had—said
good-bye there last year.' Her voice wavers so
distressingly that he thinks she is about to lose all control
over it; but no!—in a moment she has recovered her self-mastery,
and taken up her thread again. 'As I drew near
the garden, I saw that the gate was a little open, so I knew
that I had guessed right. I—looked—in; I—saw—oh!'
with a burst of indignant agony, 'are you going to make
me tell you what I saw?'[Pg 300]

'Yes,' he says breathlessly, 'tell me!—what?' A hope,
faint, and yet tenacious, lingers in his mind that it may
have been any one moment of his last night's interview
except that of the supreme embrace which she had witnessed.
He has not long to wait before this last prop is
knocked from under him.

The answer he has insisted upon reaches him in a
broken whisper; and her strained eyes are fastened upon
him, as if, in the teeth of a certainty as absolute as that of
her own identity, she were nourishing the hopeless hope
of his uttering some impossible, yet convincing, denial.
But he attempts none such. He stands before her silent,
with his arms still folded and the tide of a shoreless despair
washing over his heart. Betty has put the crowning touch
to her work.

'It is true then?' Peggy asks, in a voice of such bitter
suffering as if she were realising it for the first time; as if
she had not already known it for twelve endless hours.

'What is the use of denying it?' he replies blankly;
'you say that you saw her!'

She has risen to her feet again, risen to her full height
(how tall she is!); and once again stands confronting him,
not even asking the table-edge for any support.

'And—you—told—me—that—you—were—free!'

The words drop wonderingly from her mouth, barbed
with an icy contempt that makes him writhe. But at
least he thanks God that she does not treat him to such
mirth as Betty's.

'I told you the truth,' rejoins the poor fellow doggedly—'I
was free; I am free!'

But the consciousness of the impossibility of really
clearing his character, save at the expense of her whom he
must for ever shield, lends a flatness and unreality to his[Pg 301]
assertion, which, as he feels through every aching fibre,
will only serve the more deeply to convince Peggy of his
guilt. It is not long before he sees that he has divined
justly.

'You need not make a laughing-stock of me,' she says
with dignity, turning towards the door. But at that, the
despair which has been paralysing him awakes, and cries
out loud, giving him motion and a voice.

'You are not going!' he cries in a tone whose agony
stabs her like a knife, flinging himself upon her passage.

'What is there to stay for?' she answers, choked. But
she pauses. Can he, even yet, have anything to say?

'Do you think that I met her there on purpose?' he asks,
his words pouring out in a hoarse eager flood, as if he had
but little hope of commanding her attention for long to
them—'by appointment? Ask yourself whether it is
possible? Was I so anxious to leave you? Was not it
you that drove me away? I tell you I had no more idea
of meeting her than I had of meeting——' he hesitates,
seeking for a comparison strong enough to emphasise his
denial—'as I had of meeting one of the dead. I did not
even know that she was in the neighbourhood. I had held
no communication with her for months. It was an accident—a
mere accident!'

He breaks off suffocated. At the intense sincerity of his
tone, a sincerity which it is difficult to believe feigned, a
sort of stir has come over her face; but in a moment it
has gone again.

'Was it,' she asks with a quietness that makes his hopes
sink lower than would any noisy tears or tantrums, 'was
it by accident that she was in your arms?'

He is silent. In point of fact, he is as innocent of that
embrace as Peggy herself; but from telling her so he is,
being a man and an Englishman, for ever debarred. He
must stand there, and bear the consequences of that sup[Pg 302]posed
guilt, whatever those consequences may be. There
is a little stillness while he waits his sentence—a little
stillness broken only by the eight-day clock's tick-tack, and
by the distance-mellowed sounds of the village rising to go
about its daily work.

'Have you nothing to say for yourself, then?' she asks
at last, in a voice which she dares not raise above a whisper
for fear of its betraying her by altogether breaking down—'no
explanation to give?'

'I tell you that it was all an accident,' he repeats, with
a doggedness born of his despair. 'I can give no other
explanation.'

'And that is none,' she replies, a wave of indignation
sending back the colour to her ashy cheeks, and steadying
her shaking limbs as she again turns to leave the room.

He does not, as before, throw himself in her way; he
remains standing where he is, and only says in a dull voice:

'Are you going?'

'Why should I stay?'

'Going without saying good-bye?'

'I will say good-bye if you wish.'

'Going for—for good?'

'Yes.'

He makes no effort to change her resolution—vents no
protest—if that indeed be not one, and the strongest he
could utter, that long groan with which he flings himself
on a chair beside the table, and covers his face with his
hands. She has reached the door. No one hinders her
from opening it and leaving him, and yet she hesitates.
Her sunk blue eyes look back at him half relentingly.

'Are you sure,' she says quaveringly, while her pale lips
tremble piteously—'are you sure that you have nothing to
say—nothing extenuating? I—I should be glad to hear it
if you had. I—I—I—would try my very best to believe
you.'[Pg 303]

There is no answer. Only the mute appeal conveyed by
that prone figure, with its despairing brown head fallen
forwards on its clenched hands. Is it possible that he has
not heard her? After a moment's vacillation, she retraces
her uncertain steps till she stands beside him. Feeling her
proximity, he looks up. At the sight of his face, she gives
a start. Can it be she herself—she that had thought to
have loved him so kindly—who has scored these new deep
lines on brow and cheek? At the relenting evidenced by
her back-coming, his dead hopes revive a little.

'Do you know what I did when I reached the walled
garden last night?—I am afraid that you will not think the
better of my common sense—I knelt down and kissed the
place where I thought that your feet might have trod last
year.'

'You did?' she says, with a catch in the breath; 'you
did? and yet five minutes afterwards you were—oh!'
breaking off with a low cry; 'and this is what men are
like!'

He sees that his poor plea, instead of, as he had faintly
hoped, a little bettering his position with her, has, read by
the light of her mistaken knowledge, only served to intensify
in her eyes the blackness of his inconstancy. Well, it is
only one more added to the heap of earth's unnumbered
injustices. It is only that Betty has done her work
thoroughly this time. But he cannot bear to meet the
reproachful anguish of the face that is bent above him,
knowing that never on this side the grave can he set himself
right with her. If only it might be for ever, instead of
for these few hurrying moments, that he could shut out the
light of day! The clock ticks on evenly. It sounds unnaturally
loud and brutal in his singing ears; but its tick
is not mixed with any light noise of retreating footsteps.
She is still lingering near him, and by and by a long sob
shudders out on the air.[Pg 304]

'If you could persuade me that I was wrong,' she wails;
'if you could persuade me that it was some hideous delusion
of my eyes—people have had such before now—that it
existed only in my wicked fancy! Oh, if you could—if you
could!'

'I cannot,' he replies hoarsely; 'you know that I cannot.
Why do you torment me?' He has answered without
looking up, still maintaining the attitude dictated by his
despair; but when a little rustle of drapery tells him that
she is really departing, he can no longer contain himself,
but falls at her feet, crying out, 'Tell me how bad my
punishment is to be!'

For a moment she looks down on him silently, her face
all quivering as with some fiery pain; then in a very low
voice:

'Punishment!' she says; 'punishment! There is no
question of punishment. It is only that you have killed my
heart.'

'Killed—your—heart!' he repeats blankly, as if too
stunned to take in the meaning of the phrase.

'Yes,' she says, breathing fast and heavily; 'yes. I do
not think you knew what you were doing. I believe it
was a sudden madness that seized you—such a madness as,'
with a touch of scorn, 'may be common to men. I know
but little of them and their ways; but—but—what security
have I against its seizing you a second time?'

He writhes. A second time? Oh, if she did but know
how little it had seized him the first!

'If I married you now,' she goes on, her voice gaining a
greater firmness, and a new and forlorn stability coming
into her white face, 'I should love you, certainly. Yes,'
with a melancholy shake of her head, 'I think that I shall
never leave off loving you now. But if I married you, I
should make you very unhappy; I should not take things
easily—I should not be patient. And however happy we[Pg 305]
might be when we were together, since you have killed my
trust in you, you would never be out of sight that I should
not be fancying that you were—as—as—as I saw you last
night.'

Her voice has dropped to an almost inaudible pitch.
He has risen to his feet again, and some instinct of self-respect
helping him, stands silently before her, accepting
the doom which, as he hopelessly feels, can be averted by
no words that he has leave to utter.

To her ears has come the noise of nearing wheels—the
wheels of the fly he had ordered over-night to take
him to the station, allowing the smallest possible margin
of time in which to get there, so that as little as possible
might be robbed from the poignant sweetness of his last
farewells.

The poignant sweetness! He almost laughs. That
sound must have hit her ears too, judging by the long sob
that swells her throat, and by the added rush of anguish in
her next words:

'I ought to have believed what they told me of you, but
I would not; I would believe only you—only you; and
this is how you have rewarded me!'

He locks his teeth together hard. For how much longer
can he bear this? There comes over him a rushing temptation
to try to buy one soft look from her to take with him,
by the hypocrisy of asking her forgiveness; he whose whole
smitten soul stands up in protest against the need of any
forgiveness.

But no. Sooner than descend to such an equivocation
he will depart on his lonely way uncomforted.

'I must go,' he says steadily, though his lips are livid.
'Will you—would you mind shaking hands with me?'

He is going. She had known what the wheels meant, and
yet there seems a murderous novelty in the idea. She has
put her death-cold hand into his; speech is almost beyond[Pg 306]
her; but she mutters some poor syllables about not wishing
him ill.

'Peggy,' he says, with a solemnity such as that of those
who are spending their last breath in some sacred utterance;
'Peggy, you are wrong! Any one to whom you told your
story—any one who had to judge between you and me,
would say that you were right; but you—are—wrong! If
I have killed your heart, you have killed mine, so we are
quits. Good-bye!'

CHAPTER XXX

The Whitsun garlands that had so gaily wound about the
pillars of Roupell Church have long ago been taken down,
dead and faded. Poor Peggy has once again stood all day
on her ladder, and decked aisle and chancel and font and
altar with the manifold roses and the May lilies that by
Trinity Sunday are bountifully ready to her hand. Once
again has Mrs. Evans sat in a pew and helped her with
moral suasion, and with easy suggestions of alterations
that would entail her undoing half her work.

The scent of the lilies is too much next day for the
youngest church-going Evans, and he has to be carried out,
with his boots in the air, to the great delight of the schoolchildren,
and enlivenment of the congregation generally.
Not one of the civil parishioners, dropping in now and
again to observe her progress and offer help, would think
that the Peggy they see smiling down upon them from
her ladder had been lately treading on hot ploughshares.
But yet she has. The worst is over now, she tells herself.
Which was the worst hour? Which the worst moment?
she asks, with what she thinks to be a perfectly dispassionate
inquiry. That one when she had found his glove lying
quite naturally, and as if at home, on the hall-table?
That one when she had had to tell Prue that it was all
over; when through the obstinacy of the young girl's disbelief
she had had to asseverate and re-asseverate it, until
she had almost screamed out loud in the agony of that[Pg 308]
reiteration? That one when scarce two days after the
blow had fallen, going on some necessary business to the
Parsonage, Mrs. Evans had met her with the triumphant
announcement that she—Mrs. Evans—had been right after
all in her conjecture as to Lady Betty Harborough? that
though it might not be known to many persons, yet the
fact was none the less certain that she had paid a flying
visit to the Manor: Mrs. Evans's nurse having had the
information from the very flyman who had driven her from
the station; adding the circumstance, that so little sense
of shame did she manifest that she insisted upon an open
fly.

'Of course the children were the pretext,' pursues the
Vicar's wife, with a shrug; 'it is so shocking to think that
they should be made accomplices, as it were. One always
feels,' looking affectionately round at the various Evans
specimens—old and new baby, little girl with a cold,
middle-sized boy with a stomach-ache, kept indoors by
reason of these ailments, and now littering the worn carpet—'one
always feels that one's children are one's best
safeguard.'

And Peggy remembers to have smiled. That a hideous
knife is cutting her own heart in two, does not make the fact
of Mrs. Evans's virtue requiring a safeguard at all the less
funny. The worst is over, so she assures herself. The
wren that sang at her chamber-window, waking her to tell
her that Talbot was at the gate, that waked her all the
same when it had no such news to tell her, is happily
silent.

The pungent hawthorn-blossoms are discoloured and
dead. She smiles drily as she sees them swept up, and
rolled away in Jacob's barrow. What a mercy it would be
if she could sweep up the dead brown love they emblematise,
and get Jacob to wheel it away too!

After all she is but where she was before Whitsuntide,[Pg 309]
where she has been all her life. She has only a few, such
a few steps to retrace. Ah, but the retracing of those
steps! The nights are worst. All the great nations of
the variously woeful on this sorrowful earth's face, know
that the nights are worst. Oh, the agony of that crying
out of strong souls for earth's supreme good just shown
them, and then for ever snatched away! She had thought
herself happy before—quite sufficiently happy, and had
walked smiling and content along her path, until suddenly
one had taken her by the hand, and had led her into God's
paradise; and having just given her time to have her astonished
eyes for ever dazzled by the shining of that great
light, had pushed her away into the darkness, where she
must stand henceforth with blind hands beating on the
unopened door. She had thought herself happy before.
In the darkness she laughs out loud. She had mistaken
that wretched farthing rushlight for day.

All night she struggles in the deep waters, foothold
slipping from under her. All night she fights with dragons,
with noisome, baleful creatures, like stout Christian in the
Valley of the Shadow; wrestles with temptations unworthy
of her; with base longings to have him back, even though
it be to go shares with another in his love; to cry 'Come
back, come back! fool me, cheat me again—only come
back!'

She had told him but the truth in saying that when she
cared for any one, she cared very badly. She is caring
very badly now, and it goes hard with her. What wonder
that the wakening birds and the uprising wind of morning
find her daily staring dry-eyed, watchful, languid, at the
rose of dawn!

'Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How can she seek the empty world again?'

But through the day no one finds out her languor; no[Pg 310]
one knows that she is going about her daily work unfortified
by sleep. Happily for her there is no one to observe
her very nicely. If there were any one to steal anxious
glances of sympathy at her to see how she is bearing it,
she must break down; but, as I have said, happily for her,
there is no one.

Prue, indeed, is quite affectionate and sorry; rather
remorseful, in fact, at the consciousness of having but
grudgingly given that kindness which, as it turns out,
would have been needed only for one week. Her method
of compensation for former shortcomings, that of repeating
many times how unworthy she had always thought Talbot
of her sister, is perhaps scarcely judicious. The assertion
of his unworthiness cuts Peggy like a lash, but she bears
it with set teeth and a sort of smile. It is true. He is
unworthy. And after a while—but a little while—this
part of her ordeal is over; for Prue, swallowed up in the
sea of her own coming troubles, forgets to remember that
there is any one else struggling in the waves.

And so, by and by, Peggy grows to walk her ploughshares
with as unshrinking a foot as if they were velvet
turf; grows to thank God again for her garden, and to
be able to thank Him even for that one glimpse of the
supremest good, though given but to be withdrawn; last
of all, to acquiesce in that withdrawal. Since she is so
urgently needed by the poor little life beside her, it is as
well, so she tells herself, that she should have no distracting
life of her own to pull her two ways. Whatever else
her Prue loses, she can now never lose her.

And as time goes on, it seems as if Prue, too, were to
have her losses. The first of these is perhaps but a little
one, merely the loss of that promised company of her
betrothed through those rich June days when Oxford is
holding her yearly riot of pleasure—the riot from which
he had joyfully engaged to steal away to her quiet side.[Pg 311]
But, as has happened not unfrequently before in Freddy's
history, as it may be confidently predicted will happen
not unfrequently again, he has promised more than when
pay-day comes he is able to perform. After all, it seems—and
at that poor Prue would be the last to wonder—Commemoration
cannot get on without him.

Strange as it may appear, among the crowd, unusually
large this year, that throngs to the fair city for her
saturnalia, and extensive as is the acquaintance among
undergraduates of the Hartley family—two of the sons,
indeed, being at the present time members of the University—there
is no one who is found capable of doing the honours
of the festival to these comparatively new acquaintance
with the exception of Mr. Ducane. He is therefore compelled,
in compliance with his own creed of, as he very
nobly says in his letter to Prue, 'making Self march last
in the Pageant of Life,' to forego the simple joys he had
planned in his sweetheart's company, and carry his absent,
yearning heart through the bustle of theatre, ball, and
fête. It is not until the last moment that he has announced
to Prue his change of project, not until all her little
preparations for his reception had been made, all the
flowers gathered to be laid on the altar of the poor soul's
God.

'He might have told you before,' says Peggy indignantly,
when one morning the news of this defalcation is brought
her by a trembling-lipped pale Prue.

'He did not know it himself,' replies the other, in eager
defence; 'he says so somewhere, doesn't he?' (turning
over the pages in feverish search); 'or if he did know, it
was out of consideration for me that he kept me in the
dark, that I might have less time to be disappointed in;
and he was right. I have had all these weeks—all this
hope and looking forward—to the good.'

Her under-lip quivers so piteously, as she makes this[Pg 312]
cheerful statement of her gains, that she puts up her
hand in haste to hide it. But after all, Commemoration
is only a matter of four days; and perhaps it is worth
while to have the pleasure of his company deferred for
that short interval, for the sake of the still higher pleasure
she receives on his return, of hearing him read aloud to
her a choice little poem he has found time to write on the
subject of his own distraught wandering through the gay
throng; questioning every maid he meets as to why she
was not Prue. After he is gone, Prue repeats it—she has
already learnt it by heart—with sparkling eyes to her
sister. It is not only that it is so beautiful, as she says,
but it is so true. Nobody could write like that, unless he
felt it, could he now? Peggy is spared the pain of a reply
by her sister's hurrying off to copy out the lines into that
gold-clasped, vellum-bound volume, in which, written out
in his sweetheart's best hand, the productions of Mr.
Ducane's muse find a splendid shelter, until that surely
near moment when rival publishers will snatch them from
each other. She has plenty of time to devote her best
penmanship to them, as it turns out; since after two days
at the Manor, Freddy has to be off again. It is to London
this time that a harsh necessity drives him. Freddy never
'goes,' or 'wishes to go.' He always 'has to go.'

'Whatever happens, we must not lose touch with the
Great World-Heart beating outside us!' he has said,
looking solemnly up at the stars over his betrothed's
head, hidden sobbingly on his breast.

And she, though she knows little, and cares less, about
the Great World-Heart, acquiesces meekly, since he must
be right. So the Red House relapses into its condition of
female tranquillity; a tranquillity of two balked young
hearts beating side by side. The one pastures her sorrow
on the name that now appears almost daily among the
titled mob that crowds the summer columns of the Morning[Pg 313]
Post. The other digs hers into the garden; paints it into
pictures for the workhouse; turns it into smiles for the
sorrowful; stitches it into clothes for the naked.

The stillness of high summer is upon the neighbourhood;
all the leafy homes around emptied of their owners; the
roses, ungathered, shedding their petals, or packed off in
wet cotton-wool to London. Milady is in London. So
are the Hartleys. So is everybody; everybody, that is,
except the Evanses. The Evanses are at home. They
mostly are. A family of their dimensions, even in these
days of cheap locomotion, does not lend itself to frequent
removals. A couple of years ago, indeed, milady good-naturedly
whisked off the Vicar for a fortnight's Londoning.
But he came back so unaffectedly disgusted with his cure,
his offspring, and his spouse, that the latter cherishes a
hope, not always confined to her own breast, that this act
of hospitality may never be repeated. And hay-harvest
comes. The strawberries ripen, and jam-making begins.
The Evans boys are home for the holidays; and one of
them breaks his leg. The threatened baby arrives; and
all the little events, habitual in the Red House's calendar,
happen punctually; for even the Vicarage fracture is not
more than the usual and expected outcome of the summer
holidays. But neither hay-time, nor hot jam-time, nor
holiday-time bring back Freddy to the Manor, whither his
country-loving aunt has hastened back joyfully to spud
and billycock and shorthorns, a round month ago. He
does not even write very often. How should he? as Prue
says. How could any one who knows anything of London
expect it of him? But in all his letters, when they do
come, there is invariably an underlying ring of sadness,
that proves to demonstration how cogent though unexplained
are the reasons which alone keep him from
that dear and sacred spot, where alone, as he himself says,
his soul reaches its full stature. But at length, apparently,[Pg 314]
the occult causes relax their hold of him; and when
August has begun to bind her gold stooks, and the cuckoo
has said good-bye, he comes. In August. It is a month to
whose recurrence Peggy has looked forward with dread:
to her a month of anniversaries. Happily it is only to
herself that they are anniversaries. Who but she will
remember that on such a day the fox bit Talbot? Dingo
himself has certainly forgotten it; though he is as certainly
quite ready to do it again, if the chance is afforded him.
Who will know, or even suspect, that such and such days
are made bitter to her by the fact that on their fellows in
last year he drove the mowing-machine, or gathered the
lavender, or cut out the new flower-bed? She smiles half
sarcastically, wrapping herself securely in the cloak of her little
world's entire indifference to her epoch-making moments.

'One has no windows in one through which one's friends
can look in at one,' she says philosophically, 'even if they
would take the trouble. Mrs. Evans perhaps would take
the trouble; I do not know any one else that would. As
long as one is not foolish outside, it does not matter; and
I am not foolish outside.'

August is here; and the sacred seat under the Judas-tree,
the seat that had been forbidden to Peggy during her
one triumph-hour, is again occupied: save in the dead of
the night has, for the last five days, been scarcely a moment
unoccupied; and Prue's little cup—the cup that had run
as low as mountain-springs in a droughty summer—again
brims over.

'It is so much better than if he had never gone away,'
she says rapturously, 'for then I might have thought that
he liked me only because he had never seen anything
better; but now that he has had all the most beautiful
ladies in London at his feet——'

But she has not the heart to suggest that the present
emptiness of the Manor of all inmates, except himself
and his aunt, may count for even more in Mr. Ducane's
assiduities than his indifference to the London beauties.

One afternoon she has left the young pair cooing on
their rustic seat as usual, and has betaken herself to the
Manor, on one of her mixed errands of parish business and
individual friendliness to its mistress. She finds the old
lady surrounded by all the signs and symptoms of a new
hobby—plans, encaustic tiles, designs for the decorated
pans and skimmers of an ornamental dairy.

'I have a new toy, my dear!—congratulate me!' says
she, looking up from the litter around her, almost as radiant
as Prue; 'an ornamental dairy-house! I cannot think
how I have lived without it for sixty-five years! After
all, there is nothing like a new toy; you would not be the
worse for one,' she adds, glancing kindly at the girl's face,
a little oldened and jaded since this time last year, its
beauty lending itself even less than it had then done to
Lady Betty's sarcasm about being improved by being bled.
'And Prue?—how is Prue? She is not in want of a new
toy par hasard?—still quite satisfied with the old one, eh?
Well, he is a very ingenious piece of mechanism!'

'Very!' replies Peggy drily.

'And when are the banns to be put up?' inquires the
old lady abruptly, resting her arms upon the heap of her
plans and estimates, and pushing up her spectacles on her
forehead, in order to get a directer view of her young
vis-à-vis. 'I should like to have a week's notice, in order
to get myself a new gown; Mason was telling me this
morning that I have not one that can be depended upon
to hold together.'

'The banns?' repeats Peggy, a flush of pleasure spreading
over her face; 'then he has told you! Oh, I am so
glad! I was afraid that he would not!'[Pg 316]

'Told me!' repeats the elder woman, with a withering
intonation; 'not he!—trust him for that! No doubt he
has some high-falutin' reason for not doing so; it would
wound my feelings!—it would be dangerous at my age!
He had rather efface himself and his own interests for ever
than roughen, by one additional pebble, my path to the
grave!' mimicking, with ludicrous insuccess, Freddy's round
young tones. 'Told me?—not he!' The tinge brought
into Peggy's face by that emotion of transient satisfaction
of which milady's words have proved the fallaciousness,
dies out of it again. 'Nobody has told me,' continues the
old lady tranquilly; 'I have only taken the liberty of
seeing what was directly under my nose. No offence to
you, Peggy; but I had quite as soon not have seen it.'

'Of course—of course,' replies Peggy, flushing again.

'I suppose that we have no one but ourselves to thank,'
says milady, with philosophy, her eye returning affectionately
to one of the designs for the front of her hobby. 'I
do not care about that one; it is too florid—it would look
like Rosherville. Throw two selfish idle young fools
together, and the result has been the same since Adam's
time!'

Peggy's heart swells. Idle and selfish! Never, even in
the most secret depths of her own mind, has she connected
such epithets with her Prue; and here is milady applying
them to her as if they were truisms.

'I must send him away somewhere, I suppose,' pursues
Lady Roupell, with a rather impatient sigh. 'He is an
expensive luxury, is Master Freddy, as your poor little
Prue would find; but no doubt it will come cheaper in the
end. Give him a couple of hundred pounds, and pack
him off on a voyage round the world! Believe me, dear,'
laying her hand—whose tan, contracted by an inveterate
aversion for gloves, contrasts oddly with its flashing
diamonds—compassionately on Peggy's shoulder, 'he[Pg 317]
would have clean forgotten her before he had got out of
the chops of the Channel.'

A great lump has sprung into Peggy's throat, constricting
the muscles.

'And she?'

The old woman shrugs her shoulders.

'When we are forgotten, child, we do the graceful thing,
and forget too. I suppose we all know a little about that.'

Margaret has picked up one of the Dutch tiles that are
to line the walls of milady's new plaything; but it is but
a blurred view that she gets of its uncouth blue figures.

'She would not forget,' she says in a low voice, that,
low as it is, has yet been won with difficulty from that
seeming mountain in her throat; 'she has put all—everything
into one boat! Oh! poor Prue, to have put everything
into one boat!'

'And such a boat!' adds milady expressively.

For all rejoinder, Peggy fairly bursts out crying. The
accumulated misery of weeks, so carefully pent and dammed
in the channels of her aching heart, breaks down her poor
fortifications. Her own life-venture hopelessly perished!
Prue's foundering on the high seas before her very eyes!
She had not cried for herself; she may, at least, have
leave to cry for Prue.

'God bless my soul, Peggy!' says the elder woman,
taking off and laying down her spectacles, and speaking
with an accent of pronounced surprise and indignation;
'you do not mean to say that you are going to cry!
There's an end to all argument while you are sniffing like
that.' Then as the girl rises to go, but imperfectly strangling
her sobs, she adds in a still vexed but rather remorseful
voice: 'You make me feel quite choky too. You have no
right to make me feel choky! Run away! run away!
What do I care for any of you? I have got my dairy-house!'

CHAPTER XXXI

'And such a boat!' The words ring in Peggy's ears
through her homeward walk. After all, she had heard
no new thing. That Freddy was an unseaworthy craft to
which to commit the precious things of a life, the gems and
spices of a throbbing human soul, has long been a patent
fact to her. But there is a wide difference between a fact
that has only been presented gently to one by one's self,
and the same fact rudely thrust under one's eyes and
into one's reluctant hands by some officious outsider.

'And such a boat!' She is unconsciously repeating
milady's simple yet pregnant commentary on her nephew's
character as she re-enters her own garden. Almost as she
does so she is aware of Prue flying past her without seeing
her, a condition of things explained by the fact of her
handkerchief being held to her eyes in obvious passionate
weeping.

Prue, too, crying! An idea dazedly flashes across her
brain that Prue must have overheard, and before common-sense
can correct it, the girl is gone.

With a still more uncomfortable feeling at her heart
than that which had been already there, Margaret continues
her course to the Judas-tree. One of the pair she had left
smiling beneath its shade is still there, and still smiling;
or, if not actually smiling, at least in a mood that has no
relation to tears.

He is lying all along on the garden-seat—Prue's de[Pg 319]parture,
though no doubt deplored, has at least given him
more room to stretch his legs—and is murmuring something,
apparently of a rhythmic nature, half under his breath, as
he stares up at the clouds.

'What have you been making Prue cry about?' asks
Peggy, abruptly stopping before him.

Freddy starts a little, and reluctantly begins to draw
back his legs, which, being too long for the bench, are
elevated upon and protruding beyond its rustic arm.

'I am sure you are not aware of it, dear,' he says pleasantly,
'but your question has taken rather an offensive
form. Prue is crying, I regret to say; but why you should
instantly conclude that it is I that have made her cry, I
am at a loss to imagine. I think, Peg, I must refer you to
1 Corinthians xiii.'

'You used to tell me that I always made her cry,' returns
Peggy sternly; 'that I was hard upon her; that she
"needed very tender handling."'

'Did I indeed?' says the young man, with a sort of
wondering interest. 'It shows how cautious one ought to
be in one's judgment of others. Thank you for telling
me, Peg!'

'What have you been talking about to make her cry?'
repeats Peggy, with a sad pertinacity. 'She was not in
the least inclined to cry when I went away. I never saw
her more joyous, poor little soul!'

'I may return the compliment, dear,' retorts Freddy,
carrying the war into the enemy's quarters, and staring up
with a brotherly familiarity into her still flushed and tear-betraying
face from under the brim of Prue's garden-hat,
which, as being more comfortable and wider-brimmed than
his own, he has worn all afternoon. 'What have you been
talking about to milady to make you cry?'

She puts up her hand with a hasty gesture. She had
not known or thought about the ravages wrought on her[Pg 320]
face by her late weeping; but now that the consciousness of it
has been brought home to her, she is for a moment put out
of countenance. But in a second she has recovered herself.

'We were talking of you,' she replies gravely. 'Milady
knows; she has found out about you and Prue.'

Freddy has abandoned his prone posture; he is sitting
up, lightly switching the end of his own boot with a small
bamboo; Prue's hat, being capacious, veils his face almost
entirely.

'I should have thought that the information would have
come more gracefully from you,' continues Peggy coldly.
'I should have thought it would have been better if you
had told her.'

'If I had told her,' repeats Freddy dreamily, without
looking up; 'after all, Peggy, there was not much to tell:
"I love;" "I am loved." The whole scheme of Creation
lies in those two phrases; but when you come to telling—to
putting it into brutal words——'

It is a warm evening, but Peggy feels a slight sensation
of cold.

'It will have to be put into brutal words some day or
other,' she says doggedly, with an indignant emphasis on
the three syllables quoted from Mr. Ducane's speech.

'"Some day, some day!"' echoes he dreamily, humming
the refrain of the hackneyed song. 'Of course it will,'
lifting his head again, and staring at the heavens. 'Good
Lord, Peggy, what a pace that upper strata of cloud is
driving at! there must be a strong current up there, though
it is so still down here. You know, dear, you and I have
never been quite at one upon that head. I have always
thought that it took the bloom off one's sacred things to
blare them prematurely about.'

There is such a tone of firm yet gentle reproach in his
voice, that, for a second, Peggy asks herself dazedly, 'Is it
possible that he is in the right?'[Pg 321]

'And what did milady say?' inquires the young fellow
a moment later, in a lighter key, growing tired of watching
the racing vapours in the upper air, and bringing his eyes
back to earth again. 'You have not told me what milady
said. Did she recommend my being put back into long-clothes?'

'No.'

'I am not at all sure that I should not be more comfortable
in a white frock and a sash,' continues Freddy, laughing;
'I do feel so ridiculously young sometimes. I do not
think that either you or dear Prue quite realise how young
I am. You take me too seriously, Peggy. It is rather
terrible to be taken so seriously.'

He has risen while speaking, and drawn coaxingly nearer
to her. She looks at him with a sort of despair. It is
quite true. He is terribly, ridiculously young. As her
glance takes in the beardless bloom of his face, the Will-of-the-wispy
laughter of his eyes, it comes home to her with
a poignant force never before fully realised how ludicrous
it is—ludicrous if it were not tragic, that commonest of
earthly alternatives—for an agonising human soul to trust
its whole life-treasure, without one thrifty or prudent reservation,
into his butterfly keeping. Probably her thought
translates itself into her sad eyes; for Freddy fidgets
uneasily under them, slashes at a tree-bough with his
bamboo, shifts from foot to foot.

'You are young,' she says sorrowfully, 'but you are
twenty-one; at twenty-one——'

'At twenty-one Pitt was Prime Minister, or nearly so;
that is what you were going to say, dear, was not it? Do
not! I shall never be Prime Minister. I am like port
wine,' breaking into a smile like sunshine; 'I should be
better for a couple of voyages round the Cape!' and he is
gone.

Though Margaret has been unable to extract from[Pg 322]
Freddy the occasion of Prue's tears, she has no great difficulty
in learning it from the sufferer herself.

'It was very stupid of me,' she says, though the fountain
shows symptoms of opening afresh at the bare recollection,
'and very cruel to him; he always says that the sight of
tears unmans him so completely, that he cannot get over it
for hours afterwards' (Peggy's lip curls). 'And of course
it was only out of kindness, for my own good that he said
it; as he told me,' blushing with pleasure at the recollection,
'when one is in possession of a gem, one naturally wishes
to have it cut and polished to the highest pitch of brilliancy
of which it is capable. Was not it a beautiful simile?'

'Yes, yes; but that was not what made you cry, surely?'

'Oh no, of course not; what made me cry,' clouding
over again, 'was that he said—he spoke most kindly, no
one could have spoken more kindly—that he was afraid
that I had no critical faculty.'

'Was that all?' says Peggy, relieved. 'Well, a great
many people go through life very creditably without it. I
do not think I should have cried at that.'

'He was reading me some new poems of his,' continues
Prue, not sensibly cheered by this reassurance; 'and when
he had finished, he begged me to point out any faults I saw
in them. And I told him what was the truth—that there
were not any—that I thought them all one more beautiful
than another; and then he looked rather vexed, and said
he was afraid I had no critical faculty.'

Peggy smiles, not very gaily.

'He had better show them to me next time.'

'Do you think that he would have been better pleased
if I had picked holes in them?' inquires Prue anxiously.
'But how could I? They all seemed to me to be perfectly
beautiful; I did not see any holes to pick.'

'Do you happen to have them by you?' asks Peggy.
'If so, we might look them over together, and provide our[Pg 323]selves
with some criticisms to oblige him with when next
he calls.'

'No—o,' replies Prue reluctantly; 'I have not. He
took them away with him, I think—I suppose that he
wanted to read them to somebody else—somebody more
intelligent. Peggy'—after a pause—'do you suppose that
Miss Hartley has a critical faculty?'

The sisters are sitting, as usual after dinner, in their
little hall. Prue stretched upon her favourite oak settle;
Peggy on a stool at her feet.

'My dear,' with an impatient sigh, 'how can I tell?'

'I dare say it must be very tiresome to be always praised,'
pursues Prue, after a pause, in a not very steady voice—'particularly
if you are, as he is, of a nature that is always
struggling up to a higher level—"agonising," as he said to-day,
"after unrealisable ideals."'

Peggy coughs. It passes instead of a remark.

'I have often thought how terribly insipid he must find
me,' pursues Prue, with a painful humility. 'But I suppose,
in point of fact, the more brilliant you yourself are, the
more lenient you are to other people's stupidity; and, after
all,' with a distressingly apparent effort at reassuring herself,
'he has known it all along. It is not as if it came
fresh to him; and I do not think that I am any duller than
I was last year. Of course, if I had profited by all the
advantages I have had in his conversation, I ought to be
much brighter; but at least I do not think that I am any
duller—do you?' eagerly grasping her sister's arm as if
to rivet her attention, which, in truth, is in no danger of
wavering.

'No, dear; of course not,' very soothingly.

'Come and sit on the settle by me,' cries Prue restlessly;
'we can talk more comfortably so, and I can rest my head
on your shoulder. It is such a nice roomy shoulder.'

There is a pause. The moon looks in from the garden.
A startle-de-buzz booms by on the wings of the night, and
once an elfin bat sweeps past on the congenial dusk.

The night is in Margaret's soul too, and not such a
bland white night as that spread outside for elves to
dance in.

'I am going to say such a silly thing,' says Prue presently,
heralding her speech by a fictitious laugh. 'If it
were not rather dark, I do not think that I should dare to
say anything so foolish. I am going to ask you such a
stupid question; I am sure you will not consider it worth
answering. Do you think it possible—ha! ha! I really am
idiotic to-night—that he might ever—not now, of course—if
you had seen how distressed, how heart-broken he was
to-day at my crying, you would not have thought there was
much danger of its happening now—but,' her speech growing
slow, and halting with quick feverish breaths between,
'do you think it is just possible that sometime—many
years hence—twenty—thirty—he—might grow—a little—tired
of me? There! there!' her utterance waxing rapid
and eager again; 'do not answer! Of course, I do not
mean you to answer!'

Peggy is thankful for the permission to be silent thus
accorded to her; but she does not long profit by it.

'I think I had rather that you did answer, too,' says
Prue, with a quick uneasy change of mind. 'It seems
senseless to ask questions and get no answer to them;
and, after all, there can be but one answer to mine.'

Peggy shivers. There can indeed be but one answer;
but how dare she give it?

'Why do not you speak?' cries Prue, growing restless
under her sister's silence. 'Did not you hear me say that
I should like you to answer me after all? I believe you
are asleep!'

'How can I answer, dear?' replies Peggy sadly. 'I[Pg 325]
have so little acquaintance with men and their ways; and
I am not sure,' with a small bitter laugh, 'that what I do
know of them is very much to their credit.'

There is a ring of such sharp hopelessness in her tone
as to arrest the attention of even the preoccupied younger
girl.

'You were not very lucky either, Peggy,' she says softly,
rubbing her cheek caressingly to and fro against Margaret's
shoulder. 'Why do I say either?' catching herself quickly
up. 'As if I were not lucky—luckier than anybody; but
you were unlucky. Oh, how unbearable to be unlucky in
that of all things! And I was not very kind to you,
was I?'

Peggy's heart swells. Her lips are passing in a trembling
caress over her sister's hair.

'Not very, dear.'

'Somehow one never can think of you as wanting any one
to be kind to you,' says Prue half-apologetically; 'it seems
putting the cart before the horse. But,' with a leap back
as sudden as an unstrung bow to her own topic, 'you have
not answered my question yet! Oh, I see you do not
mean to answer it! I do not know what reason you can
have for not answering; but, after all, I do not mind. I
ought never to have asked it. I had no business. It was
not fair to him. Of course he will not get tired of me,'
sitting up and clasping her hands feverishly together; 'and
if he does,' with a slight hysterical laugh, 'why, I shall just
die at once—go out like the snuff of a candle, and there
will be an end of me, and no great loss either.'

CHAPTER XXXII

In order perhaps to give an ostensible reason for her last
flying visit to the empty Manor, or more likely (since she
is not much in the habit of testing the value of her actions
by the world's opinion) for her own solace and consolation,
Lady Betty Harborough had taken her little son with her
on her return home; had taken also her daughter, though
the latter's company is a matter of much less moment to
her maternal heart.

The departure of the children had, at the time, been an
unspeakable relief to Margaret. The recollection of the
poignant pain and inconvenience she had endured last year
from their questions upon John Talbot's departure, such as,
'When was he coming back?' 'Would not she like him
to come and live with her always?' make her look forward
with dread unutterable to a repetition of such questions, to
which her new circumstances lend an agony lacked by her
former ones. How shall she answer them if they ask her
now whether she would like John Talbot to come back and
live with her always? Shall she scream out loud?

It is, then, with untold relief that she hears that they
are gone, whipped off with such promptitude by their parent
as to be unable to make their adieux to the Red House,
the fox, and the fondly loved though freckled Alfred.
That they have again reappeared on the scene, she learns
only a couple of days after her interview with milady, by
coming upon them and their nurses suddenly at a turn of[Pg 327]
the Road. The shock is so great—Lily is wearing the very
same frock and Franky the same hat in which they had
burst into her love-dream on the first morning of her engagement—that
she cuts their greetings, to their immense
surprise, very short, and, under the pretext of extremest
haste, breaks away from their eager little hands and voices.

Her conscience smites her when the sound of sobbing
overtakes her, and she turns her head to see Franky
fighting with his nurse to get away and run after her, in
order to rectify the, to him, unintelligible mistake of her
want of gladness at meeting him. Poor Franky! She has
not so many lovers that she can afford to rebut the tenderness
of even so small a one as Master Harborough. She
will make it up to him next time. It is not long before she
is given the opportunity. On the following morning she
is sitting at her writing-table doing the weekly accounts,
when a rapping as of minute knuckles on the outer door is
followed—before permission to enter can be either given or
refused—by the appearance of a small figure, that of Miss
Lily, who advances not quite so confidently as usual.

'Oh, Miss Lambton!' she says rather affectedly, obviously
borrowing a phrase she has heard employed by her
mother, 'how fortunate I am to find you! We have come
to see you. Franky wants to know whether he was naughty
yesterday that you would not speak to him. He thinks he
must have been naughty. He has sent you a present; he
did not like to give it you himself, so he has asked me.
He took a bit of Nanny's letter-paper when she was not
looking, to wrap it up in. It is not hers really; it is ours,
for there is "Harborough Castle" on it. Nanny always
likes to write to her friends on paper with "Harborough
Castle" on it.'

During her voluble speech, she has come up to the table
and deposited in Peggy's hand a tiny untidy parcel, piping
hot, evidently from the pressure of anxious small fingers[Pg 328]
tightly closed over it, all the way from the Manor to the
Red House. Peggy begins to unroll it; but before this
operation is nearly completed, a second little voice is heard,
in intense excitement from the door.

'It is my knife that father gave me after I was ill;
it has five blades, and a scissors, and a button-hook, and a
corkscrew, and a file. It cost ten and sixpence; and I like
you to have it: it is a present.'

The next moment Master Harborough and the object of
his affections are in each other's arms. It is a long time
before she can persuade the little generous heart to take
back its offering; before, with the tears in her own eyes,
she can succeed in forcing it back to its natural home in
the pocket of his sailor trousers; before general conversation
can be introduced by Lily.

'Just as we were setting off we saw Freddy going out
riding,' says she agreeably. 'He would not tell us where
he was going; but Nanny thinks it was to Hartley's. Why
does she say "Hartley's" instead of "Mr. Hartley's"? She
always talks of Mr. Richards, the butcher!'

Simultaneously with this unanswerable query about her,
Nanny herself appears with a note in her hand, which she
has been commissioned by Lady Roupell to give to Miss
Lambton, and which, when she is once more alone—the
children having scampered off to embrace Alfred—Miss
Lambton opens. She does so with some slight curiosity.
The envelope is so large as to imply the certainty of an
enclosure. Milady's own notes are not apt to require much
space, nor is the present one any exception to her general
rule. It runs thus:

'Dear Peggy,

'This woman has asked me to forward you the
enclosed. I do not quite know why she could not find
out your address for herself. Freddy has worried me into[Pg 329]
saying I would go. It is such a long while off that we
shall probably all be dead and buried first. Meanwhile, do
not order a fly, as I can take you and Prue.

'Yours,

'M. R.'

With a heightened interest Peggy turns to the enclosure.
It reveals a large and highly glazed invitation card, on
which Mrs. Hartley announces her intention of being 'At
Home' on the evening of the 15th of September, and which
holds out the two lures—each lurking seductively in its
own corner—of 'Theatricals' and 'Dancing.' While she
is still looking at it, Prue comes up behind her and reads
it over her shoulder; and as she does so, the elder sister
hears her breathe quicker.

'Oh, Peggy!' she cries, with agitation, 'then I shall
see her at last. I shall be able to judge for myself. It is
so odd that we should never have met her, living in the
same neighbourhood; it shows how little we go out, does
not it? He has always been so anxious that we should
know her, almost ever since he knew her himself. How
long is that ago?' stifling a sigh. 'Oh, a long time ago
now! He says he is always trying to make the people he
likes clasp each other's hands.'

'And is he very successful generally?' asks Peggy
drily.

But Prue's eyes have lit upon Lady Roupell's note, and
her attention is too much absorbed in it for her even to
hear her elder's sarcastic question. Peggy would fain have
spared her the pain of reading the sentence that refers to
Freddy. But it is too late. Margaret becomes aware of
the moment when she reaches it by the slight colour that
rises to her eager face.

'He was always so good-natured about the Hartleys,'
she says, in hasty explanation; 'he would have been just
the same to any one else in the same position. He[Pg 330]
thought that people left them out in the cold; he never
can bear any one to be left out in the cold.'

'This does not look much like being left out in the cold,
does it?' says Margaret, rising, walking to the chimney-piece,
and setting up the card against the dark background
of the old oak; 'since it is our only invitation, it is well
that it is such a smart one. What an odd fashion it is,
when one comes to think of it, that a woman should
consider it necessary to send these magnificent bits of
pasteboard flying half over the country, merely to tell us
that she is at home!'

'There is no need for us to do that,' rejoins Prue rather
disconsolately; 'we are always at home.'

'We shall not be at home on the night of the 15th
of September,' says Peggy, laughing, and passing her arm
fondly round her sister, who, unable to keep away from
the magnet of Mrs. Hartley's invitation, has followed it
to the fireplace.

'The 15th of September,' repeats the other, dismayed;
'is it possible that it is not till the 15th of September?
Oh, what a long time off! How I wish that I could fall
asleep now, and only wake up on the very morning!'

Peggy sighs. There is to her something terrible in her
sister's eagerness, knowing, as she does, how little it has in
common with the wholesome hearty hunger for pleasure of
her age. But she speaks cheerfully:

'The play will be the better acted; the floor will be the
better waxed.'

'I am sure that it was he who reminded them to ask us;
I am sure that they would never have remembered us but
for him,' pursues the young girl, colouring with pleasure.
'He used to say—indeed,' still further brightening, 'he said
it again not so long ago, that he always felt a sensation of
emptiness about a room that I was not in.'

'Oh, Miss Lambton!' cries Franky, bursting into the[Pg 331]
room, and bringing with him a somewhat powerful agricultural
odour, 'we have been having such fun! we have been
helping Alfred to fork manure. Nanny is so cross; she is
coming after me—oh, do not let her find me! do hide me
somewhere!'

But unfortunately Master Harborough's attendant is
able to track him by another sense than sight, and from the
shelter of Peggy's petticoat, magnanimously extended to
protect him, he is presently drawn forth, and carried off,
in company with his sister, to a purification profoundly
deprecated by both.

For the next four weeks the Hartley card of invitation
remains enthroned in the place of honour on Peggy's
chimney-piece. Festivities are not so rife in the neighbourhood
of the little Red House that it runs any risk of
being dethroned, or of even having its eminence shared.
Freddy has been affectionately taxed by his betrothed with
having been instrumental in its despatch, but he has
delicately denied.

'I always think,' he says prettily, 'that there is a magnet
in the heart of all good people, drawing them towards each
other; so that you see, dear, there was no need for me.'

The magnet of which he speaks must be in great force
in his own case just now, judging by the frequency with
which the ten long miles—always charged by the flymen as
eleven—between the Manor and the home of the Hartleys
are spanned by him. Prue does not always hear from
himself of these excursions, though, indeed, he makes no
great secret of them. Oftener an officious young Evans
thrusts upon her the fact of having met him going in the
accustomed direction; oftener still, the little Harboroughs
innocently mention it as a thing of course; oftenest, her
own heart divines it. And after all, what can be more
natural than that at such a juncture his services should be
needed and asked; than that he whose mouth has always[Pg 332]
been so full of the beauty and duty of living for others,
should give them readily and freely? And again, what
can be more natural or obvious than that his presence
should be needed, should be indispensable in fact, in the
endless discussions as to the choice of a play, interminable
as the ever famous ones in 'Mansfield Park;' and that
with him it should rest to adjust the jarring claims of the
young Hartleys, of whom some pipe, some harp, and some
do neither, but are none the less resolved to display themselves
in one capacity or another before the ——shire
public? And, later on, when the stage with its decorations
arrives from London, what can be more natural than that
those among the scenes which do not commend themselves
to the actors' liking should be painted afresh; and that
again Freddy's unerring taste and illimitable good-nature
should be called into play?

'You really are too good-natured, Mr. Ducane,' Mrs.
Hartley reiterates; 'you let them impose upon you. You
really ought to think of yourself sometimes; it does not do not
to think of one's self sometimes; one has to be selfish now
and again, in this world.' And Freddy, aloft on a ladder
with a large brush in his hand, and smouches of paint on
his charming face, smiles delightfully, and says he should be
sorry to have to think that. And when he does make time
for a visit to the Red House, he is so affectionate; brings
with him such an atmosphere of enjoyment; is so full of interesting
pieces of news about the progress of the preparations,
of pleasant speeches as to the intense eagerness on
the part of the whole Hartley family to make Prue's acquaintance,
that for twenty-four hours after each of them
her spirits maintain the level to which the fillip of his easy
tendernesses has lifted them.

'It would be tiresome if it were to last for ever, I grant
you,' she says to Peggy one day, with an assumption of
placid indifference; 'but as it is a temporary thing—so[Pg 333]
very temporary—why, in less than a fortnight now it will
be over, how silly I should be to care! In less than a
fortnight' (her face growing suffused with a happy pink)
'we shall go back to our old ways; and the Hartleys will
be off in their fine yacht round the world—and good luck
go with them! I like him to help them. I tell you I like
it,' reiterating the assertion as if knowing it to be one
not very easily to be believed; 'it would not have tallied
at all with my idea of him if he had refused.'

And Peggy only rejoins despondently: 'Well, dear, if
you are pleased, so am I.'

Not, indeed, that Margaret contents herself with this
depressed acquiescence in her sister's eclipsed condition.
She has on several occasions, and despite many gently
conveyed hints on his part that she is not judicious in
her choice of opportunities, endeavoured to tackle Mr.
Ducane on the subject of his future, to obtain some definite
answer from him as to the choice of a profession, etc.
But her unsuccess has been uniform and unvaried. It is
not that he has ever refused to discuss the question
with her. Indeed, in looking back upon their conversation
she is always puzzled to remember how it was that he had
eluded her. She has generally ended by tracing his escape
back to some exalted abstraction; some sentiment too
delicate for the wear and tear of everyday life; some bubbling
jest.

'You know, dear,' he says to her very kindly one day,
when she has been pointing out to him, with some warmth,
the entire frivolity of his present mode of life; 'you know,
dear, that you and I are always a little at odds as to the
true meaning of the word "education." I have always
felt that the soul's education can be more furthered by
what the world calls "play," than by what it has chosen
to define specially as "work." There is no use in forcing
one's spirit, dear Peggy. One is much more likely to learn[Pg 334]
the lines that one's true development ought to follow by
sitting still and listening humbly to the voice of the Erd
Geist.'

'And the voice of the Erd Geist tells you to paint drop-scenes
for the Hartleys'?' replies Peggy witheringly; but
her sarcasm furthers her cause as little as do her more
serious reasonings.

At the end of the month that intervenes between the
arrival of the Hartleys' invitation and the fulfilment of its
promise, that cause is exactly where it was. By milady
Peggy has been spared any further reference to the subject
of her sister's engagement; nor, as far as is known to the
girl, has Lady Roupell taken any step such as she had
threatened for the separation of the lovers.

With a stab at her heart Peggy recognises the reason
of this inaction. The shrewd old woman sees how needless
is her interference; and, being kind as well as shrewd,
refrains from giving the last unnecessary shove to the
tottering card-house of poor Prue's felicity.

CHAPTER XXXIII

'At Charing Cross, hard by the wayWhere we, thou know'st, do sell our hay,There is a house with stairs;And there did I see coming downSuch folk as are not in our town;Forty at least in pairs.'

On the night of the 15th of September a great many more
than forty pairs of feet were passing up and down the
stairs of that magnificent specimen of Jackson's domestic
architecture, the Hartleys' new palace in ——shire.
Amateur theatricals are, strange as it may appear, since
going to see them is almost invariably the triumph of
hope over experience, always an attractive bait to hold out
to a country neighbourhood. Apart from the pleasure of
thinking how much better than do the actors, one could
have played their parts one's self; and that opposite and
more good-natured, if not quite so acute pleasure, of
wondering with Miss Snevellici's patroness, 'How they
ever learnt to act as they do, laughing in one piece, and
crying in the next, and so natural in both,' there is, in the
present case, an element of curiosity which adds an additional
poignancy to the expectation of enjoyment usual
in such cases.

It is the Hartley coup d'essai in hospitality in the county,
and there is a widespread interest manifested as to how
they will do it. Almost as widespread is the comfortable
conviction that they will do it well.[Pg 336]

An old-established squire who has been seated on his
modest acres for a couple of hundred years may venture
to invite his friends to dance on a sticky floor to the sound
of a piano, and to wash away their fatigue in libations of
50-shilling champagne; but the millionaire, who has only
within the last year set an uncertain foot upon the land,
is not likely to try any such experiments upon the county's
patience. It is, then, with a confident hope of Gunter and
Coote and Tinney that the occupants of most of the
carriages step out on the red cloth—a hope that the first
glimpse of the banks of orchids that line the entrance-hall
goes far to make a certainty.

From the minds of the occupants of one carriage, to
whose turn, after long waiting in the endless string, it at
length comes to set free its load, Gunter, Coote and Tinney,
and orchids are equally distant. Milady's head is still
running on her Patience, which, by the aid of a carriage-lamp
and a pack of tiny cards, she has been playing contentedly
during the whole of the long ten miles. The little portion
of Peggy's heart that is not filled with an aching compassion
and anxiety for her sister is pierced by the fear of the
extreme likelihood, in so promiscuous a gathering of three-fourths
of the county, of her finding herself face to face
with the one woman whom she would compass sea and
land to avoid, and with the man whom that woman habitually
carries in her train.

And Prue?

'I think he is sure to be at the door to receive us, do
not you?' she has whispered to her sister, under cover of
milady's absorption in her solitary game, while they are
still waiting in the string; 'not that I shall be so silly as to
attach any importance to it if he is not; but after a whole
week!' stifling a sigh. 'Oh dear!' letting down the glass and
craning her neck impatiently out, 'shall we never get there?
I see carriage-lamps for half a mile ahead of us still!'[Pg 337]

A whole week! It is true. For a whole week the
Red House has been favoured with no glimpse of Mr.
Ducane. How should it, indeed, since he has been
compelled by the exigencies of his situation to take up
his abode entirely at the scene of his labours? Of what
use to waste upon the long ride there and back time so
precious in a last week? the time of one upon whose
inexhaustible stock of ability and good-nature every one
thinks him or herself entitled to draw.

But though he has been unable to present himself in
person to his betrothed, he has had time to scribble her a
tiny pencil-note, just a word—but then how little can the
value of a letter be measured by its length!—praying her
to keep a place for him by her side at the theatricals.

'If my Prue refuses, it will be all over with my pleasure,'
he ends simply.

The carriage, after many tantalising halts opposite dark
laurels, draws up finally before a blaze of electric light, a
crowd of powdered footmen, an arching of palm-boughs;
and milady steps deliberately out in her fur boots and her
diamond 'fender,' followed by her two protégées. Freddy
is not at the door to receive them; and the moment that
she has discovered this fact, Prue sees the irrationality of
the hope that had led her ever to expect that he would be.
He is naturally not in the cloak-room, where milady seems,
to the girl's passionate impatience, to loiter unconscionably
long, tugging at the strings of her sortie de bal, which have
got into a knot, and talking to the numerous friends she
meets there. To do her justice, it is not any care for her
toilette that detains her. She would quite as soon have
the famous tiara—her 'fender,' as she always calls it—which
the county has admired for fifty years, on crooked
as straight. The county expects to see it on great occasions,
and so she puts it on; but if Mrs. Mason were to
dispose it behind before, the circumstance would disturb[Pg 338]
but very slightly her lady's equanimity. Mr. Ducane is
not, as far as can be made out by a first glance, in the
magnificent music-room, to-night arranged as a theatre, and
at whose door Mrs. Hartley stands, smiling and splendid,
to receive her guests. But though Prue's eye has as yet
to fast from the sight of her betrothed, her ear at least is
gladdened by his praises.

'Oh, Lady Roupell, I do not know how we ever can
thank Mr. Ducane enough!' she hears Mrs. Hartley
exclaim. 'My girls say they do not know what they
should have done without him—so kind, so clever, and
unselfish is not the word!'

Milady grunts.

'No, I do not think it is,' she says, half sotto voce, as she
passes on.

At the first look, the room, superb as are its proportions,
seems already full; but a closer inspection reveals at the
upper end several still vacant rows of arm-chairs, reserved
by the host and hostess for those among their guests whom
they most delight to honour. To this favoured category
belongs milady, and she is presently installed with her two
young friends by a sémillant papa Hartley, in the very
middle of the front rank. For the present, nothing can be
easier than for Prue to keep the chair at her side vacant.
She has already anxiously and surreptitiously spread her
white frock over it. Each of earth's glories has probably
its attendant disadvantages; a warm and consoling doctrine
for those to whose share not much of life's gilding falls;
nor is a seat in the front row of synagogue or playhouse
any exception to this rule. It has the inevitable drawback,
that except by an uncomfortable contortion of the
neck-muscles, it is impossible for its occupants to see what
is going on in the body of the room; and the view of
foot-lights and a drop-scene is one that after a while is apt
to pall.[Pg 339]

Prue's head is continually turning over her shoulder, as,
from the body of the long hall, all blazing with pink-shaded
electric lamps, comes the noise of gowns rustling, of steps
and voices, as people settle into their seats. At first she
had had no cause for uneasiness. The people, as they tide
in, conscious of no particular claim to chief places, pack
themselves, with laughs and greetings to acquaintances,
into the unreserved seats. But presently Mr. Hartley is
seen convoying a party of ladies and men to the top of the
room with the same evidences of deferential tenderness as
he had shown to milady; and no sooner are they disposed
of, according to their merits, than he reappears with the
same smile, and a new batch. This continues to happen
until the human tide, like its prototype in its inexorable
march over swallowed sands and drunk rocks, has advanced,
despite the piteous protest in Prue's eyes, to within three
chairs of her. Yes, including that one so imperfectly veiled
by the poor child's skirt, there are only three vacant seats
remaining.

'Oh, I wish he would come! Oh, I wish he would
come!' she repeats, with something that grows ever nearer
and nearer to a sob in her voice. 'Oh, Peggy, do you
think he will not come after all? You are longer-sighted
than I am; do look if you can see him anywhere! Oh, I
wish he would come! I shall not be able to keep this
chair for him much longer, and then——'

Her words are prophetic. Scarcely are they out of her
mouth before the vision of the radiant host is again seen
nearing them, with a fresh freight—a freight that rustles
and jingles and chatters louder than any of the previous
ones.

'Oh yes, do put me in a good place!' a high and
apparently extravagantly cheerful voice is heard exclaiming;
'I always like the best places if I can get them—do not
you? and I mean to applaud more loudly than anybody.[Pg 340]
I have been engaged by Freddy Ducane as a claque; and I
assure you I mean to keep my word.'

Although she has been expecting it—although she has
told herself that to hear it is among the most probable of
the evening's chances, yet, at the sound of that clear thin
voice, Peggy turns extremely cold. It has come then. In
a second she will certainly be called upon to hear another
voice. Let her then brace herself to bear it decently. Her
hands clasp themselves involuntarily, and she draws in her
breath; but she cannot lift her eyes. She sits looking
straight before her, waiting. But instead of the tones that
with such sick dread she is expecting, she hears only
milady's voice—milady's voice not in its suavest key.

'Oh! it is you, is it? How many of you are there?—because
we are pretty full here; and I suppose you do not
mean to sit upon our knees.'

'There is nothing I should like better!' cries Lady Betty
friskily. 'You are looking perfectly delightful to-night;
all the more so because your fender is quite on one side.
Come now, do not be ill-natured, but make room for me;
you know I am not very——'

Peggy hears the voice break off abruptly; and involuntarily
her eyes, hitherto glued to the back of the chair in
front of her, snatch a hasty glance in Lady Betty's direction.
She has turned away, and is addressing Mr. Hartley in an
altered and hurried key.

'After all, I hope you will not think me very changeable,
but I believe I should like to sit a little farther back; one
sees better, and hears better, and gets a better general
idea.'

'She is going away!' whispers Prue, with a long quivering
sigh of relief. 'Oh, I was so frightened! I thought she
was going to take my chair. Why did she go? She could
not have seen us!'

But this is not quite the conclusion arrived at by Peggy,[Pg 341]
as her eyes follow Betty's retreating figure—Betty, with her

'Little head Sunning with curls'

that go to bed in a box—Betty, with the docile Harborough
and a couple of Guardsmen at her heels; and—without
John Talbot! That for one chance evening she should
happen to lack his attendance is, after all, but small evidence
against his being still riveted with her fetters; but Peggy's
heart swells with a disproportionate elation at the discovery.
There is, alas! not much likelihood of poor Prue's feeling
a like expansion; for scarcely has she finished drawing the
long breath caused her by Betty's retreat, than the seat which
the latter had spared is approached, settled upon, and irrevocably
occupied—poor Prue's barriers politely but ruthlessly
swept away.

She has attempted a hurried protest, but it has not been
even heard; and now it is too late, for a bell has rung.
The curtain has swept aloft, with less of hesitation and
dubiousness as to the result than is generally the case with
amateur curtains, and discloses to view the second Miss
Hartley seated under the rustic berceau of a wayside
Italian wine-shop, in peasant's cap and bodice, soliloquising
rather nervously and at some length. What is the drift of
that soliloquy; or of the dialogue that follows with a person
of a bandit nature, whom it takes some moments for his
acquaintance to decipher into a young man Hartley; or of
the jiggy catchy songs with which the piece is freely interspersed,
Peggy will never know to her last day.

Before her eyes, indeed, there is a phantasmagoria of
people going and coming in a blaze of light—of more be-peasanted
Misses Hartley, with more banditted brothers;
in her ears a brisk dialogue that must be funny, judging
from the roars of laughter coming from behind her; of
smart galloping quartettes and trios that must be humorous[Pg 342]
and musical, from the storm of applause and encores that
greet them. But to her brain penetrate none of the gay
and smiling images conveyed by her senses. Her brain is
wholly occupied by the painful and impossible effort to
calm Prue, whose agitation, rendered more unmanageable
by the weakness of her state of health and the lack of
any habit of self-government, threatens to become uncontrollable.

'Oh, Peggy, why has not he come? What has become of
him? Where can he be?' she keeps moaningly whispering.

Peggy has taken hold of one of her sister's feverish
hands, whose dry fire is felt even through her glove, and
presses it now and again.

'He will be here directly,' she answers soothingly; 'no
doubt he could not get away. You heard how useful he
has been! Probably he is helping them behind the scenes.
Do not you think that you could try to look a little less
miserable? I am so afraid that people will remark it.'

'If he is behind the scenes,' moans Prue, not paying any
heed to, evidently hardly hearing, this gentle admonition,
'he is with her. You see that she is not acting either!
Wherever they are, they are together! Oh, Peggy, I
think I shall die of misery!'

The close of her sentence is drowned in a tempest of
riotous applause, and Peggy's eyes involuntarily turn to the
stage, to learn the cause. One of the performers, who has
been throughout pre-eminently the funny man of the piece,
is singing a solo, accompanied by many facetious gestures.
The drift of the song is the excessive happiness of the
singer—a theme which is enlarged upon through half a
dozen successive verses:

'The lark is blithe,And the summer fly;Blithe is the cricket,And blithe am I.None so blithe, so blithe as I!'

Peggy happens to have some acquaintance with the
singer off the stage; knows him to be sickly, melancholy,
poor; to-night racked with neuralgia, yet obliged to do
his little tricks, and go through his small antics, on penalty
of banishment from that society, his sole raison d'être in
which is his gift of making people laugh.

CHAPTER XXXIV

'We men may say more, swear more; but indeed,Our shows are more than will, for still we proveMuch in our vows, but little in our love.'

The Hartleys are wise enough to avoid the error so common
amongst amateur actors and managers, of prolonging their
treat until pleasure is turned into weariness. They are
obviously mindful of the fact that among their audience
are a number of dancing feet, whose owners not even the
acting of Rachel or Mrs. Siddons would indemnify, in
their own opinion, for having the fair proportions of their
dancing hours thrown away. The operetta has only three
acts, and is followed by no farce or afterpiece. In point of
fact, it is contained within the limits of a couple of hours.
Yet to two of its auditors it appears practically interminable.
To two amongst them it seems as if there never
would be an end to its songs, its facetious misunderstandings,
and jocose makings up; and when at length the curtain
falls amid a hurricane of applause, only to be instantly
drawn up again in order that the whole of the final
quartette may be repeated, it appears as if they must have
sat watching it for nights. At last the curtain drops
finally. At last there is an end to the endless encores.
The performers, in answer to the shouts which demand
them, have appeared in turn before the curtain, and
made their bows, and picked up their bouquets, with
such differing degrees of grace and aplomb as their native[Pg 345]
gifts, or more or less familiarity with the situation,
allow.

The sad little merryman has cut his final caper, and
made a grimace of so surpassing a ludicrousness as will allow
him to be peacefully melancholy for the rest of the evening.

And now all eyes are turned away from the stage; all
tongues are loosed. The doors at the end of the hall are
opened, and a stream of people is beginning rapidly to issue
through them. Every one has risen and is looking about,
glad to shift their position, say 'how do you do' to their
friends, and exchange comments on play and actors.

There is a general stir and buzz; a seeking out of expected
friends, and delighted greeting of unexpected ones;
a reciprocal examination of gowns, now first possible; and
a universal aspiration for supper.

Milady and her girls have risen with the others. Prue,
indeed, has been the first person in the room on her legs.
She is looking round, like the rest of the world; at least,
so to a casual observer it might appear. But, alas! what
is there in common between the smiling careless glances,
lighting with easy amusement on indifferent objects, and
the tragic searching—terrible in its one-ideaed intentness—of
those despairing blue eyes? Peggy has firm hold of one
burning hand, and is murmuring broken sentences of
comfort into her inattentive ear.

'Yes, dear, yes! I will go with you wherever you like;
but you know we cannot quite leave milady; and he is
more likely to find us here. I dare say he has been looking
at us all the while from behind the scenes, trying to see
how you were enjoying yourself.' She leaves off hopelessly,
since Prue is not listening to her. Snatches of talk, disjointed
and mixed, reach her ear.

'Jackson was the architect; built the new schools at
Oxford; they always strike one as rather like a splendid
country house.'[Pg 346]

'Thoroughly well built; made all his own bricks; sent
them up to London to be tested; best that ever were
made!'

'Really nearly as good as professionals; better than
some professionals; might easily be that. They say that
the one who acts best of all did not act to-night—the eldest.'

'Why did not she, I wonder?'

'Better employed perhaps—ha! ha!'

At the same moment Peggy feels a convulsive pressure
on her arm, and hears Prue's passionately excited voice:

'There he is! at the far end of the room; he is looking
for us! Oh, how can we make him see us?'

She has raised herself on tiptoe, and is sending a look
of such agonised entreaty down the hall as, one would
think, must penetrate even the mass of shifting, buzzing
humanity that intervenes between her and its object.
Perhaps it does. Perhaps the magnet that Freddy once
prettily suggested to be in the hearts of all good people
drawing them together is exercising its influence on his.
At all events, in a few minutes they see him smilingly
pushing his way, stopped at every step by greetings and
compliments—for it has somehow become generally diffused
through the room that to him is to be ascribed most of the
glory of the entertainment—through the crowd. In a
moment more he is before them.

'Here you are, you dear things!' he says, taking a hand
of each, looking flushed and handsome, and speaking in an
excited voice. 'Did not it go off wonderfully well?—not
a hitch anywhere. Did you hear the prompter once? No?
Neither of you? I thought not; and yet if you had seen
us half an hour before the curtain drew up, you would
have said that the whole thing was going to be a fiasco.'

He stops to draw a long breath of self-congratulation.

'I kept the chair beside me as long as I could,' says
Prue, in a faltering voice; 'I did my best.'[Pg 347]

His eye rests on her for a moment with a puzzled air—on
her small face, flushed like his own; but, alas! how
differently! It is evident that for the first second he does
not comprehend her, having entirely forgotten his own
request. Then recollecting:

'How good of you, dear!' he says affectionately. 'Of
course, it was a bitter disappointment to me, too; but on
occasions of this kind,' with a slight resigned shrug, 'one
must, of course, give up all idea of individual enjoyment.'

He is such an embodiment of radiant joy as he speaks,
that Margaret cannot help darting an indignant look at him—a
bolt aimed so full and true, that it hits him right in
his laughing eyes.

'Of course,' he says, reddening under it, 'I do not mean
to say that there has not been a good deal of incidental
enjoyment; but you, dear,' turning to Prue, with lowered
voice—'you who always see things intuitively—you will
understand what a distinction there is between pleasure
and happiness—Innigkeit!'

She has lifted her eyes, cleared for the moment of their
agonised seeking, to his, and is beginning a little trembling
eager speech to assure him of her complete comprehension;
but his own mind having meanwhile flown off at a tangent,
he breaks in upon it:

'Was not that song excellent—

"The lark is blithe, And the summer fly"?

Quite as good as anything of Grossmith's—do not you think
so! Did not it make you laugh tremendously? Oh, I
hope, dear,' with an accent of rather pained reproach, 'that
it made you laugh!'

Prue hesitates. In point of fact she had not heard one
word of the jocose ditty alluded to; as, during the whole[Pg 348]
of it, she had been keeping up a conversation in heart-broken
whispers with Peggy.

'Oh yes; of course,' she answers nervously; 'it was
very funny—excessively funny! I—I—should like to hear
it again. I—I—am sure that it is one of those things that
one would think much funnier the second time than the
first.'

'It is as good as anything of Grossmith's,' repeats
Freddy confidently. Then, beginning to hum a valse,
'You can have no idea what a floor this is! Be sure, dear,
that you keep quantities of dances for me!'

But before Mr. Ducane has time to signify his preferences,
a third person intervenes. Poor Prue has often expressed
a wish to see the eldest Miss Hartley; but the mode in
which our wishes are granted is not always quite that
which we should have chosen.

'Oh, Mr. Ducane,' she says, hurrying up, 'I am so sorry
to interrupt you; but it is the old story,' laughing, and
with an apologetic bow to Prue—'we cannot get on without
you. We are so puzzled to know who it is that papa ought
to take in to supper! Is it Lady Manson, or Lady Chester?
We thought you could tell us which is the oldest creation.'

Freddy has not an idea, but instantly volunteers to go
off in search of a 'Peerage' to decide this knotty point;
and Miss Hartley, having civilly lingered a moment to
excuse herself to the Miss Lambtons, and to remark in
almost the same words as her mother had used upon the
extraordinary unselfishness of Mr. Ducane, flits away after
him.

'It was too bad of her,' says Prue, with a trembling lip.
'She might at least have let him tell me how many dances
he wanted; but'—brightening up—'he said "quantities,"
did not he? You heard him?'[Pg 349]

Peggy's rejoinder is prevented by her attention being at
the same moment claimed by milady, and by a general
forward movement of the company, which has been requested
by Mrs. Hartley to vacate the hall in order that it
may be got ready for dancing.

In the slight confusion and pushing that follows, Peggy
finds herself separated from her sister and her chaperon;
and a few minutes afterwards, the joyful tidings having
spread abroad that the supper-room doors are open, an
acquaintance offers her his arm to lead her thither. She
looks around anxiously once again in search of Prue; but
not being able to catch a glimpse of either her or Lady
Roupell, can only hope that both have reached the goal of
supper before her.

The room is of course thronged—when was a just-opened
supper-room not crowded?—and it is some little
while before Peggy's partner is able to elbow a way for
her to the table, which, when she reaches it, is already
robbed of its virgin glory. She looks down the long rows
of moving jaws; catches milady's eye—milady eating pâté
de foie gras, which always makes her ill; snatches a far
glimpse of Mr. Evans setting down a champagne-glass,
with the beatific smile of one who, drinking, remembers
the Vicarage small-beer; and has a nearer, fuller view of
Lady Betty, rosy and naked as Aphrodite, laughing at the
top of her voice, and pulling a chicken's merry-thought
with one of her Guardsmen to see which will be married first.

Peggy quickly averts her eyes; and, bringing them
home, they alight upon Mrs. Evans, whom, by a singular
accident, she finds next door to her.

Mrs. Evans, as we know, cannot come under the condemnation
of those who 'have not on a wedding-garment,'
since she never wears anything else. Despite her old
dyed gown, however, she is obviously enjoying herself
with the best.[Pg 350]

'This is not the sort of thing that one sees every day,'
cries she, in a voice of elated wonder, surveying the ocean
of delicacies around her. 'I only wish I could get hold of
a menu to take home with me! I am so glad we came. I
was not at all anxious to come, on account of the distance;
in fact, I yielded entirely on Mr. Evans's account. He is
in one of his low ways; you know what that means! He
wants change; we all want change. Did you hear the
mistake he made last Sunday in the Psalms? He said, "In
the midst were the damsels playing with the minstrels."'

Peggy laughs absently.

'It sounds rather frisky.'

'I only hope that nobody noticed it,' pursues the
Vicaress; 'he always makes those kind of mistakes when
he wants change. Dear me!' casting a look and a long
sigh of envy round the room; 'if I had a house like this,
I should never want change for my part; and to think that
it is to be shut up for the whole of the winter—for a whole
year, in fact!'

The Hartleys' house has not, so far, afforded Peggy
such a large harvest of pleasure that she is able very
cordially to echo this lamentation.

'What can possess any one to go round the world passes
my understanding,' continues her interlocutor, pelican-like,
as she speaks, forcing some nougat for her offspring
surreptitiously into a little bag under cover of the table-edge;
'not but what they will do it in all possible luxury,
of course—cheval glasses, and oil-paintings, and Indian
carpets, just as one has in one's own drawing-room.'

At this last clause, sad and inattentive as she is, Peggy
cannot forbear a smile of amusement, as the image of the
Vicarage Kidder rises before her mind's eye; but it is very
soon dissipated by her neighbour's next remark.

'By the bye, some one was telling me to-night that
Freddy Ducane is to be of the party. I assured her,[Pg 351]
looking wise, that I knew better; but she persisted that
she had had it upon the best authority—one of the family,
as far as I could understand.'

She may continue her speech to the ambient air; for,
when next she looks up from her larceny of bonbons, Peggy
is gone. The hall, meanwhile, has been cleared of its innumerable
chairs, and its theatrical properties generally,
and converted into a back-room, with that surprising
rapidity that unlimited money, with practically unlimited
labour at its beck and call, can always command.

No sooner have the guests well supped, than, with no
tiresome interregnum, no waiting and wondering, they may,
if they list, begin to dance. A smooth sea of Vienna
parquet spreads before them, and established on the stage,
the British Grenadiers themselves—no mere piano and
fiddle—are striking up the initial quadrille. It is some
little time before Peggy is able to make her way between
the forming sets to where milady sits, her coronet more
hopelessly askew than ever, and an expression of good-humoured
resignation on her face.

'My mind is braced for the worst,' she says good-naturedly;
'get along both of you and dance. Not that
there can be much dancing in this silly child,' pointing
to Prue; 'she must be as empty as a drum. She has not
eaten a mouthful.'

She shrugs her shoulders, since it is evident that Prue
does not hear. In a state of preoccupation so intense as
that of the young girl's, it would be difficult for anything
presented by the senses to make its way into the brain.
She is standing stiffly upright, her head and chin slightly
advanced, as one looking with passionate eagerness ahead.
Her lips are moving, as if she were saying some one thing
over and over to herself. Whatever of her face is not
lividly white is burning; and her eyes——

As she so stands, an acquaintance comes up, and asks[Pg 352]
her for the dance, now well begun. She does not understand
him at first; but, on his repeating his request, she
refuses it curtly.

'Thank you, I am engaged.'

'If you are neither of you going to dance,' says milady,
seeing both her protégées remaining standing beside her, and
speaking with a slight and certainly pardonable irritation,
'I may as well go home to my blessed bed.'

Go home! Prue has caught the words, and cast a glance
of agony at her sister. Go home!

'Do not be impatient, dear milady,' says Margaret, trying
to speak lightly and look gay; 'you will be crying out in
quite another key just now. I am engaged for nearly all
the programme. Ah, here comes my partner!'

For by this time the quadrille has come to an end, and
a valse has struck up. To join it, Margaret walks off reluctantly,
looking behind her. She is profoundly unwilling
to leave her sister in her present state; but, since to dance
is the only means of averting milady's fulfilment of her
threat of going home, there is no alternative.

To most girls of Peggy's age the joy in dancing for
dancing's sake is a thing of the past; but to her, from the
innocency of her nature, and her little contact with the
world, which has preserved in her a freshness of sensation
that usually does not survive eighteen, the pleasure in the
mere movement of her sound young limbs, in the lilt of the
measure and the wind of her own fleetness, is as keen as
ever.

Peggy loves dancing. To-night she has a partner worthy
of her, in her ears brave music beyond praise, under her
light feet a Vienna parquet of slippery perfection; and she
is no more conscious of these advantages than if she were
dancing in clogs on a brick floor. Whenever she pauses—and,
long-winded as she is, she must pause now and again,
in whatever part of the pink-light-flooded room her partner[Pg 353]
lands her, whether by the great bank of hothouse flowers
at the lower end, or near the blaring Grenadiers at the
top, or beneath one of the portraits of famous musicians
that line the side walls—it seems to her that absolutely
nothing meets her eyes but that one tiny burning face,
stretched always forward in the same attitude, with its lips
moving, and its eyes turning hither and thither in forlorn
and desperate search. Prue is not dancing.

As Peggy, answering absently and à bâtons rompus, the
civil speeches of her companion, watches, in a pained perplexity,
the features whose misery has so effectually poisoned
her own evening, she sees a fresh expression settle upon
them, an expression no longer of deferred and piteous
expectation, but of acute and intolerable wretchedness.
She is not long in learning the cause. Following the
direction of Prue's glance, her own alights upon a couple
that have but just joined the dance. It is needless to
name them.

Peggy's partner catches himself wondering whether it
can be any of his own harmless remarks that has brought
the frown that is so indubitably lowering there to her
smooth forehead, or that has made her red lips close in
so tight and thin. He wonders a little, too, at the request
that immediately follows these phenomena.

'Would you mind taking me to Miss Hartley and her
partner? I want to speak to them; we might dance there.'

A minute of smooth whirling lands her at Freddy's side,
and fortunately for her, at the same moment some one
addressing the daughter of the house from behind takes off
her attention.

'Are not you going to dance with Prue?' she asks in
a stern breathless whisper. 'Have you forgotten that you
are engaged to Prue?'

He looks at her with a gentle astonishment.

'What are you talking about, dear? Is it a thing that[Pg 354]
I am likely to forget? Of course I must get through my
duty-dances first. Dear Prue is the last person not to
understand that. You are looking splendid to-night, Peg!
perhaps because you are so ill-tempered—evil passions
always become you. You have not a dance to spare me, I
suppose? What a floor! Tra la la!'

Away he scampers with Miss Hartley, and Peggy, curtly
resisting all her ill-used swain's entreaties to take another
turn, insists upon being led back there and then to her
chaperon. Prue shall not, through her fault, have one
second's more suspense to endure.

'It is all right!' she says eagerly, under her breath, into
the young girl's ear; 'he is getting through his duty-dances
first. It is all right.'

CHAPTER XXXV

But the execution of Mr. Ducane's duty-dances is apparently
no short task, nor one lightly or quickly accomplished.
But few of them, as it turns out, are danced in the
ball-room in the eye of the world, and of the electric light.
A far larger number are danced on sofas, in obscure corners
of little-frequented boudoirs, on steps of the stairs, and
under the palm-fans and tree-ferns of the conservatory.

And meanwhile the night swings on. Dance has followed
dance. The feet fall pat to the perfect time of the
soldiers' music: valse, galop, polka, mazurka, Lancers—Peggy
dances them all.

In the Lancers chance brings her close to Lady Betty,
who is romping through them with a staid County Member,
whom to the petrifaction of his wife, watching horror-struck
from afar, she makes romp flagrantly too. Her voice
throughout the evening is heard, penetratingly high, above
the band; her laugh seems to be ringing from every corner
of the room, accompanying her extraordinary antics. For
Lady Betty is by no means on her best behaviour to-night,
and permits herself such innocent and humorous playfulnesses
as putting a spoonful of ice down the back of one of
the young Hartleys, popping a fool's-cap out of a cracker on
the head of a bald old gentleman perfectly unknown to her,
etc. She is evidently not fretting very badly at Talbot's
absence. So Margaret thinks, as with a sort of unwilling
fascination she watches her.[Pg 356]

Lady Betty is evidently in precisely the same mood as
she was on that evening when she had favoured milady's
guests at the Manor with her remarkable song. It would
take uncommonly little persuasion to-night to induce her
to sing—

'Oh! who will press that lily hand?'

'I think she is drunk!' says Mrs. Evans charitably. 'I
am sure she acts as if she were. If I were to behave like
that, I should expect men to take any kind of liberty with
me. I should not feel that I had any right to complain if
they did.'

Peggy laughs. The idea of Mrs. Evans dancing the
can-can, and getting kissed for her pains, is so irresistibly
comic that for a minute or two she cannot help herself.

Lady Roupell has grown tired of scolding Prue for her
obstinate refusal of all invitations to dance. Milady has
happily fallen in with an old friend, whose path hers had
not crossed for thirty years. With him she fights o'er
again the battles of her youth, and forgets her 'blessed
bed.' She goes in to supper a second time, and has more
pâté de foie gras. Peggy sees it in the guilt of her eye
when she comes out.

And meanwhile Peggy herself dances on indefatigably,
returning, however, rigorously at the end of each dance to
her chaperon, in order to assure herself that there is no
change for the better in the position of Prue.

None! none! none! Always standing on precisely the
same spot; the poor little figure rigidly upright; the
flushed cheekbones; the straining eyes. Always? No,
thank God, not always! At last it is gone! At last she
finds its place vacant.

'Where is Prue?' she asks eagerly, forgetting her usual
gentle good manners so far as to break with her question
into milady's tête-à-tête.

'Prue!' repeats the other, looking round rather tartly[Pg 357]
from her interrupted conversation; 'God bless my soul,
child! how can I tell?' and so resumes her talk.

But though this is not a very lucid explanation of her
sister's absence, Peggy returns from it with a considerably
lightened heart. Since it is a matter of certainty that
Prue would never have consented to dance with any one
but Freddy, he must have come at last. They are nowhere
in sight, therefore he must have carried her off to some
retired corner, where he is persuading her—so easy of
persuasion, poor soul—of how much he has been suffering
all evening, and how extremely loftily he has behaved.
Of whatever he is persuading her, her long agony is for
this evening at least probably at an end.

Peggy draws a deep breath at the thought, and for the
first time becomes aware how good the floor is, and how
pleasant the long swallow-swoop from end to end of the
ball-room. The crowd is growing much thinner. People
who have a long distance to drive are already gone. Mrs.
Evans, bulging at every point with the result of her thefts,
and driving the reluctant Vicar before her, takes herself
off, having indulged herself in one parting whisper to
Peggy, to the effect that she 'shall not bow to Lady Betty,
even if she looks as if she expected it.' For Betty is still
here, and having run up the whole gamut of her schoolboy
follies, having grown tired of throwing tarts at her admirers,
and pelting them with lobster claws, has settled down into
a steady audacious open flirtation with a Rural Dean, the
sight of whose good lady's jealous writhings seems to afford
her a great deal of innocent joy.

Lady Roupell's old friend has been reluctantly reft away
from her by his party, and she is beginning to show signs
of uneasiness, as Peggy can see from a distance. But since
Prue's place beside her is still vacant, the elder sister is
resolved that no action of hers—however apparently called
for by the ordinary rules of politeness—shall tend to shorten[Pg 358]
the few brief moments of happiness that have come, however
tardily, to sweeten her evening's long bitterness. She
has deliberately dodged milady's messengers sent in pursuit
of her, has evaded them behind doors, and has slipped
past them in passages; and it is not until she catches a
distant glimpse of Prue returning to her chaperon on Mr.
Ducane's arm, that she at length allows herself to be
captured. Milady receives her rather testily.

'Come along! come along!' cries she fussily; 'why
did not you come before? I do not want to help blow out
the lights.'

But Peggy does not answer. Her eyes are fixed in a
shocked astonishment on Prue. Instead of the radiant transformation
she had expected to find in her—a transformation
hitherto as certain under three kind words from Freddy,
as the supplanting of night by red-rose day in the visible
world—she sees her livid, and with an expression of hopeless
stunned despair, such as never before in her saddest
moments has been worn by it, on her drawn face. Her
hand has fallen from Freddy's arm, and her sister snatches it.

'What is it, Prue? What is it?'

The girl does not seem to hear at first; then:

'Nothing, nothing!' she says stiffly. 'Home; let us
go home.'

'She is tired!' cries Mr. Ducane—he too looks pale—caressingly
lifting her other hand, which lies perfectly
limp and nerveless in his clasp, and pressing it to his lips;
'our Prue is dead-beat. Dear milady, you know you never
can recollect that we are not all Titans like yourself. She
is worn out. Are not you, Prue?'

'She would have been all right if she had had some
supper,' says milady gruffly, probably thinking in bitterness
of spirit how greatly to their reciprocal advantage it would
be, if a balance could be struck between her own past
refreshments and Prue's. Then she adds very sharply,[Pg 359]
and with an obvious disposition in her tone to hustle her
graceful nephew, 'I do not know what you are dawdling
here for? Why do not you go and look after the carriage?'

He does not require to be told this twice, and by the
alacrity with which he obeys the command, Peggy knows
that it comes at this moment most welcome. No one
could enjoy looking in a face with an expression such as
Prue's now wears, knowing that he himself has brought it
there; and for one so especially partial as Mr. Ducane to
wreathed smiles, it is doubly painful and trying.

The footman and carriage are long in being found.
Our party have to wait what seems to them for a good
half-hour in the hall, cloaked, and, as far as concerns milady,
fur-booted, while through the open hall-door streams in on
the mist the flash of carriage-lamps; the frosty breath of
horses—frosty though it is only mid-September—the noise
of gravel kicked up under hoofs; the sound of other people's
shouted names.

Freddy comes back, and stands beside Prue, and
addresses her now and again in coaxing undertones, to
which—a fact unparalleled in her poor history—she makes
no rejoinder. She is standing right in the full draught
from the open door. Her cloak is unfastened at the neck.
She has evidently not taken the trouble to tie it. The
keen north-wester blows in full upon her thin collar-bones;
but when Peggy remonstrates with her, she does not seem
to hear.

'Lady Roupell's carriage!'

Thank God, the welcome sound at last! Milady, who
has been nodding, bounds to her feet and seizes the arm
of her obsequious host, who has been struggling under
difficulties to give her a pleasant impression of her last
moments under his roof; under difficulties, since she has
been more than three-quarters asleep. Peggy hurries
after her, and Prue and Freddy bring up the rear. There[Pg 360]
are too many impatient carriages behind Lady Roupell's
for there to be any moment for last words. The footman
bangs the carriage-door, jumps on the box, and they are off.

Milady does not light her lamp or shuffle her Patience
cards again on the homeward drive. She is fast asleep
before the Hartleys' park gates are reached; nor does any
jolt or jar avail to break her slumber, until she finds
herself being bidden good-night to, and thanked by Peggy,
at the door of the little Red House. Not one word is
exchanged during the whole ten miles between the three
occupants of the brougham. Prue has thrown herself into
her corner, beside milady. Peggy, sitting back—she always
sits with her back to the horses, and has so long pretended
to like that position best, that she has at length almost
persuaded herself that she does so—leans forward every
now and then and peers into the blackness, trying to catch
a glimpse of her sister's face or attitude. In vain at first.
But after a while—once at a turnpike-gate, once at a flat
railway-crossing—a ray of light streams in, and reveals her
cast prone and hopeless in her corner, with her face pressed
against the cushions.

Before they reach the Red House, though the dawn has
not yet come, it is heralded by its dim, gray forerunner—a
forerunner that gives shape to the still colourless hedges
as they pass, and an outline to the vague trees looming out
of the dim seas of chilly vapour, that a couple of hours
more will turn into rich green meadows and yellow stubbles.
But the light is not strong enough to reach the recesses of
the carriage, to touch milady's sleepy head, rolling about in
the tiara which makes so uncomfortable a night-cap, or to
throw any cruel radiance on the blackness of Prue's despair.

The stopping of the carriage, which partially rouses the
old lady, seems not to be even perceived by the younger
woman; and it is not until Margaret has stooped over her,
pulling her by the arm, and crying in a frightened voice,[Pg 361]
'Prue! Prue! we are at home. Do not you hear, dear?
at home. Come, come!' that she slowly stirs, and lifts her
head. Peggy has given her latch-key to the footman, and
herself jumping out of the carriage, stands in the raw dawn
wind, and receiving into her arms her staggering and half-conscious
sister, carries rather than leads her into the little
house, whose door that sister had left with so bounding a
heart, such towering hopes of enjoyment seven or eight
hours ago. In a moment more, milady—her slumbers
already resumed—is borne swiftly away.

Peggy had forbidden the servants to wait up for her.
She wishes now that she had not. It is very eerie here
alone in the little dark house, whose darkness seems all
the blacker for the faint, unsure glimmer of coming day
that here and there patches the night's garment; alone
with her half-swooning sister. Thank God! there is a
lamp still burning in the sitting-hall, though the fire is out,
and the air strikes cold. She staggers with her burden to
the settle, and laying her gently down upon it, snatches
up a flat candlestick, and lighting it at the lamp, hastens
away upstairs to the closet where she keeps her drugs for
the poor, medicine for the dogs, and her small stock of
cordials; and taking thence a flask of brandy, hurries back
with it, and pours some down Prue's throat. It is not an
easy task to get it down through the girl's set and chattering
teeth; but at length she succeeds, and is presently
rewarded by seeing signs of returning animation in the
poor body, whose feet and hands she is chafing with such
a tender vigour.

'I am cold,' says Prue, shivering; 'so cold! May not
I go to bed?'

'Do you think that you can walk?' asks Peggy anxiously;
'or shall I carry you?'

'Walk!' repeats the other, with a little dreary smile.
'Why not? There is nothing the matter with me.'[Pg 362]

She rises to her feet as she speaks, but totters so pitiably
that Peggy again comes to her rescue.

'Of course you can walk,' she says soothingly; 'but
I think we are both rather tired: had not we better help
each other upstairs?'

And so, with her strong and tender arm flung about
her poor Prue's fragile, shivering figure, they slowly climb
together—oh, so slowly!—the stairs, down which Prue
had leaped with such gaiety eight hours ago.

In the bedroom, which they at last reach, the fire is
happily still alight, and only needs a few fresh coals to
blaze up cheerfully. But since Prue still shivers, long
shudders of cold running down her limbs and convulsing
her frame, Peggy wheels an arm-chair close to the fire, and
wrapping a warm dressing-gown about her sister, holds her
cold feet to the flame, rubbing them between both her
hands. For some time Prue's only answer to these attentions
is a low moan which, after awhile, shapes itself into
articulate words:

'To bed! Let me go to bed!'

And so Peggy, unlacing with a sick heart the poor
crumpled gown that had been put on in such pride and
freshness over-night, carries its drooping wearer to her bed,
and laying her down most gently in it, covers her with the
warm bed-clothes, tucking them in, and bidding God bless
her, as she has done every night for nigh upon eighteen
years.

Prue lies exactly as she had laid her down, with no
slightest change of posture, with no attempt at turning
over and nestling to sleep; her eyes wide open, with that
long shudder recurring at first at intervals. But then this
ceases, and she lies like a log—the very dead no stiller
than she—staring blankly before her. Peggy sits beside
her through the remnant of the night, watching in impotent
pain, to see whether the eyelids will never mercifully fall[Pg 363]
over those wide rigid eyes; watching the insolent light
march up and take possession of the curtained room;
watching its daring shafts push through chink and cranny
even to the dying fire. The clock has struck seven. The
servants are up and astir; and—oh, God be thanked!—at
length Prue's eyes are closed, and her head has fallen a
little sideways on the pillow. Having waited awhile, to
assure herself of the blessed fact that she is asleep, Peggy
rises noiselessly, and, turning with infinite precaution the
door-handle, passes out.

The light seems unutterably glaring in the passage, and
her tired eyes blink as they meet it; meeting at the same
moment the astonished look in Sarah's face, called forth
by seeing her still in her torn and tumbled ball-gown.
She has not the heart to spend much time in explanations,
but, passing quickly to her own room, tears off the crushed
finery, associated in her mind with an evening of such acute
misery; and having washed and again dressed in her usual
chintz morning-gown, returns to Prue's door, and listening
at it for a moment, cautiously enters. But her caution is
needless, as her first glance into the room shows her.
Though she has not been absent more than half an hour,
its aspect is completely changed. The curtains are drawn
back, and the blind pulled up to the top; and Prue, sitting
up in bed, with blotting-book and ink-bottle before her, is
rapidly writing. As her sister hastens up to her, with an
exclamation of surprise and dismay, she puts her two hands
over the page to hide it.

'I am writing a letter,' she says hurriedly. 'I do not
wish you to see what I am writing; you have no business
to look!'

'I should not think of such a thing!' cries Peggy,
drawing back pained. 'But why are you writing now,
darling? It is only eight o'clock in the morning.'

'It—it—is as well to be in good time,' she says. 'This
is a letter that ought to be written; the—the person to
whom it is addressed will—will expect to get it.'

Peggy is standing by the bed, tall and sorrowful. She
has taken the poor hand, pen and all, into her protecting
clasp.

'Is it—is it all over then?' she asks chokingly.

'He is going round the world with the Hartleys,' says
Prue, not answering directly, and beginning feverishly to
fidget with her paper and envelopes. 'Of course I should
like this to reach him before he sets off.'

Going round the world with the Hartleys! The blow has
fallen, then. Peggy had known that it was coming, as
surely as she knows the fact of her own existence. She
had seen it approaching for months; and yet now that it
has come, she stands stunned.

'I suppose that that was what he was talking to her
about all evening,' pursues Prue, looking blankly away out
of the window, to where, on the top of the apple-tree outside,
a couple of jackdaws are sitting swinging in the fresh
wind. 'That was what made him forget all about his
dances with me. Of course, there would be a great deal
to arrange; they are to be away a whole year. It was
quite natural, quite; only it showed that it was all over
with me. Even I could see that.'

She says it quite calmly, and with a sort of smile, her
eyes still fixed on the jackdaws. Peggy is still too choked
to speak.

'No one would have guessed last night that it was I who
was engaged to him, would they?' pursues Prue, bringing
home her straying look, and resting it in a half-uncertain
appeal upon her sister. 'And yet I was, was not I? It
was not my fancy; he did ask me once to be his wife—his
wife,' dwelling on the word with a long, clinging intonation—'standing
there by myself all those hours. I am sure[Pg 365]
that if he had known how it hurt me he would not have
done it; he is too kind-hearted willingly to hurt a fly.'

Peggy's only answer is a groan.

'But of course I must write to him,' continues the
younger girl, beginning again to draw her half-written sheet
of paper tremblingly towards her. 'And—and it is not
altogether an easy letter to write; you understand that.
It requires all one's attention.'

'Lie down and rest first, and write afterwards,' says
Peggy, in a tone of tender persuasion.

'No, no!' returns the other, pushing her sister away.
'I will lie down and rest afterwards; there will be plenty
of time. But I could not rest before it was written; and
do not disturb me; do not speak to me. I should be sorry
if there were anything ridiculous—anything that she could
laugh at in my last letter to him.'

CHAPTER XXXVI

Though she has begun so early, Prue is writing nearly all
day; writing sitting up in bed—writing when the eastern
sun is pouring in his rays from the gates of day—writing
when he has climbed the zenith—writing when he is
reddening westwards. She has asked to be left alone, so
as to be quite undisturbed; and when, at intervals, unable
longer to keep away, Peggy returns from her sad and
aimless rambles about the dahliad garden, and, pushing
the door, looks softly in, the same sight always greets her
eyes. Prue, with a fire-spot on each cheek, writing—writing.
And yet when the postman comes to take the
letters, it is only one small letter that he carries away.
She is very loth to let it go, even then. No sooner is it
out of her hands than she would have it back. There is a
phrase in it that she would fain have altered, that he may
think unkind. It vexes her all through the night, that
phrase. It keeps sleep away from her, even if the oppression
on her chest, caused by the heavy cold she has contracted
through standing in the draught at the Hartleys'
hall-door, would allow slumber to approach her eyes. In
the small hours, indeed, she wanders a little; and would
be up, and walk after the postman to take her letter from
him. At dawn she falls into a broken doze; and Peggy,
who has sat by or hung over her all night, poulticing, giving
her drink, holding her hand, and assuring her with tears
that there is nothing in her poor sentence that could wound[Pg 367]
Freddy's feelings, rises, stiff and cold from her vigil, and
sends Alfred off on the pony for the doctor.

He comes, and prescribes, and goes away again, leaving
behind him that little fillip of cheerfulness that the doctor's
visit always gives; and another day wears on. Prue talks
a great deal throughout it, though her laboured breathing
makes speech difficult. She is very restless: would get
up; would go down into the hall; out into the garden;
would sit under the Judas-tree. She sheds no tears, gives
no sign of depression; indeed, she laughs many times at
recollected absurdities told her by Freddy. But the fire-spots
blaze on her cheeks, and the fever-flame glitters in
her eyes.

Another night follows; sleepless as the previous one,
and with stronger delirium. She is going out riding with
her lover. He has lent her the bay mare, which he has
taken from Miss Hartley for her sake! He is waiting for
her!—calling to her! and she cannot find her whip or her
gloves. Oh, where are they? Where can they be? Will
not Peggy help her to look for them? And Peggy, with
death in her heart, feigns to search, through the chill
watches of the night, for that whip and those gloves whose
services it seems so unlikely that their young owner will
ever need again. With morning her delusions die; and,
as the forenoon advances, she falls into a heavy sleep. Such
as it is, it is induced by opiates.

Peggy has not been in bed for three nights, and an
immense lassitude has fallen upon her. It is not that she
is conscious of feeling sleepy; but her head is like a lump
of lead, and her hands are ice-cold. She would be all right
if she could get into the open air for five minutes. A
greedy longing to drink in great draughts of the fresh wind
that she can hear outside frolicking so gaily, yet gently too,
with the tree-tops, lays hold of her; and, since Prue still
sleeps heavily, she gives up her place by the bedside to[Pg 368]
Sarah, and walks drearily out into the garden. It is only
two days since she had been last in it; but it seems to her
as if years had rolled by since she had last trodden that
sward, seen Jacob digging, and watched the birds pecking
at the sunflower-seeds, and the wasps pushing their way
through the netting into the heart of the peaches. It
appears to her a phantasmal garden, with an atmosphere of
brilliance and joyousness that may have their home in that
realm where Thomas the Rhymer lived; but can have no
relationship to her bitter realities. But when she reaches
the seat under the Judas-tree, the kingdom of Thomas the
Rhymer is gone, and reality is here in its stead. As she
looks at it, her hands clench themselves, and a tide of rage
and misery surges up in her heart.

'You have killed her!' she says out loud; 'killed her
as much as if you had cut her poor throat! When she
is dead, I will tell you so!'

She walks on quickly; rapid motion may make her
burden easier to bear. But, alas! her domain is small;
and no sooner has she left Prue and the Judas-tree behind,
than the hawthorn bower and Talbot face her. The creamy
foam of flowers that had sent its little pungent petals,
shaped like tiny sea-shells, floating down upon their two
happy heads, has changed to lustreless red berries.

'They are not more changed than I!' she says; and so
sinks, helplessly sobbing, upon the rustic bench, her cheek
pressed against the gnarled trunk. 'They are all the same!—all
the same!' she moans. If it were not so, would she
be lying with her head achingly propped against this rough
bark? Would not it have been resting on her love's breast?
Would not he have been telling her that Prue will get well?
She has no one now to tell her that Prue will get well;
and when she tells herself so, it does not sound true.

The tears drip from under her tired lids. One moment
she is here, with aching body and smarting soul; the next[Pg 369]
she is away—how far, who shall say? Away, at ease; all
her sorrows sponged out, for God has sent her His lovely
angel—sleep.

It is two hours later when she wakes with a frightened
start, and springs—half unconscious of her whereabouts at
first—to her feet. The position of the sun in the sky, the
altered angle of the shadow cast by her may-bush, tell her
to how much longer a period than she had intended her
five minutes have stretched. She begins to run, with a
beating heart, back towards the house. Prue will have
missed her! Prue will have been crying out for her! How
stupid, how selfish of her to fall asleep!

She has entered the hall, when the noise of a closing door—her
ear tells her Prue's—reaches her; and by the time she
gets to the foot of the stairs she is confronted by a person
coming quickly down. It is not Sarah, nor yet the doctor.
It is the person to whom, beside the Judas-tree, she had
framed that bitter message. She can give it now if she
chooses. Freddy's hair is all ruffled, and the tears are
streaming down his face—real, genuine salt tears.

'Oh, Peggy!' he cries, in a broken voice, as he catches
sight of her, seizing both her hands; 'is that you? Come
and talk to me! Come and say something nice to me!
I am so miserable! Oh, how dreadful these partings
are!'

As he speaks he draws her back into the hall with him;
and throwing himself on the settle, flings his arms down
upon the cushions, and his head upon them.

'Have you seen her?' asks Peggy in a shocked stern
voice. 'Do you mean to say that you have seen her?'

The answer comes, blurred and muffled, from among the
pillows.

'Yes, yes.'

'You are not satisfied, apparently, with the way in
which you have done your work,' rejoins Peggy, with an[Pg 370]
intonation of icy irony, though her voice trembles; 'you
are anxious to put the finishing-stroke to it!'

'I do not know what you are talking about,' says
Freddy, lifting his tossed head and his tear-stained face,
and looking at her with his wet eyes. 'I can see by your
look that you mean to be unkind—that you have some
cruel intention in your words; but you may spare yourself
the trouble. I am so wretched that I am past feeling any
blow you may aim at me. I knew nothing of her illness;
her letter reached me only an hour ago. I came to see her;
she heard my voice. Oh, Peggy, you do not realise how
keen love's ears are! She asked to see me; she was lying
on the sofa in her dressing-room. My Prue!—my Prue!
What have you been doing to her? Oh, that word "Good-bye"!
What long reverberations of sorrow there are in it!'

At the sight of the young man's emotion, so overpowering
and to all appearance so genuine, Peggy's heart has been
softening a little; but at this last sentence, uttered with
something of his old manner of lofty and pensive reflection,
it hardens again. Bitterness, such as had seized upon her
by the Judas-tree, is rising again in her.

'You keep to your plan, then? you are going?' she asks,
breathing hard, and with a sort of catch in her voice.

'And leave her as she now is?' answers Freddy, with
an accent of wounded reproach, which perhaps in his
opinion may exempt him from answering the question
directly. 'Oh, my Peg, if I could but teach you to credit
your poor fellow-creatures with at least bare humanity!'

'Then I am to understand that you are not going? that
the idea is given up?'

She is still standing inexorably over him.

'I do not know why we should discuss the subject at all
to-day,' returns Mr. Ducane, again interring his head in
the cushions; 'I have not the heart to discuss anything
to-day.'[Pg 371]

'Then you did not mention the subject to her?'

'She introduced it herself; she has quite come round to
think it a good plan—if you do not believe me, you may
ask her—a year's probation to make me fitter for my Prue'—in
a voice of dreamy tenderness. 'Oh, Peggy, cannot
you understand what a sacred deposit the care of such a
soul as Prue's is? cannot you comprehend that I do not
feel yet worthy of it? You know, dear, I am very young,
though you never will own it; and you cannot put gray
heads upon green shoulders. Be merciful to me, little friend!
be merciful to me!'

As he makes this coaxing request, he takes her reluctant
hand and presses his wet cheek against it. But she feels
no mercy in her heart, and promises him none even when
she leaves him stretched full-length upon the settle, shaken
with real sobs. For her, he may sob as long as he pleases;
while in one panic-stricken bound upstairs she reaches her
sister. She finds her—the Prue upon whom the doctor
had enjoined such a strict confinement to bed and maintenance
at one temperature—sitting, not even lying upon
the dressing-room sofa, breathing labouringly, with every
symptom of imminent bronchitis, with racing pulse and
burning hands, but with heaven in her eyes.

'You have seen him,' she says pantingly, as Margaret
comes in. 'You have heard—oh, do not scold me for
getting up! I know that I ought not, but I will go back
to bed as soon as you like; and—and it is real, is not it?
it is true? I am not wandering. I was last night, I know;
but I am not now, am I? Give me something of his,
something to hold that I may be sure that it is true!'

Peggy has sat down upon the sofa beside her, and
gathered up the little quivering figure into her arms.

'I will go back to bed now,' says Prue restlessly; but
oh, with how different a restlessness from that of three
hours ago! 'If I do not, I shall be longer in getting well,[Pg 372]
and I want to get well quickly. If I do not get better he
will not go, and it would be selfish to hinder him from
doing what is so much the best thing for him; yes, and for
me too—for me too! Take me back to bed, Peggy.'

So Peggy takes her back to bed, and as she lays her
down the thin arms close gratefully round her neck.

'You dear old soul! It is your turn for a bit of luck
next.'

And when the night comes—the night dreaded by
watchers beside sick-beds, the night that doubles fever and
sharpens pain, and accentuates grief—Prue, clasping to her
feverish breast an old glove, left behind by careless Freddy
on some former occasion, wakes repeatedly with a jump
from her broken slumbers to ask in a terrified tone, 'Is it
true? Is it real?' And Peggy is always there, always
awake, always beside her to answer reassuringly that it is.
It would have been too flagrant a violation of the laws of
nature and disease, if poor Prue had escaped scot-free from
her infraction of both; and, in fact, her escapade is followed,
as the meanest observer might have predicted that it would
be, by a very sharp attack of bronchitis.

For a few days her illness is so acute that it seems as
if Mr. Ducane would be placed in the painful dilemma
of either leaving his betrothed fighting hand to hand with
death, or of abandoning his cherished project. He arrives
at the Red House in the morning, almost before the
shutters are opened; he strays for hours about the garden
with his hands clasped, his head bent forward, and his
charming face as white as a sheet, till even Jacob's bowels
yearn over him; though the style of observations by which
he elects to show his sympathy are not perhaps precisely
of a cheering nature, consisting chiefly of remarks such as
that 'his missis says she never see any one go downhill so
quick as Miss Prue—never.'

One day when Prue is at her worst, Freddy lies on the[Pg 373]
floor at her threshold, with his face buried in the mat, to
the intense admiring compassion of Sarah and the nurse;
but he really is not thinking of them. By and by the
disease yields to treatment. Perhaps the patient's determination
to get quickly better—her eagerness to return to
a life once more become joyous and valuable to her—counts
for much in the quickness of her rally.

Whatever be the cause, Prue is certainly better—is able
once again to sit up; to shake milady's hearty hand, and
eat her excellent jelly. But by the time that she is able to
do so, the Hartleys' monster yacht is getting up her steam
at Southampton; and all her passengers, with the exception
of Mr. Ducane, are off to embark upon her. Within two
days the die must be cast as to whether Freddy is to be of
that ship's company or not.

'It is for you to decide, sweet,' he says, in his south-wind
voice with all the joyousness taken out of it, as he
half-lies, half-sits, beside the dressing-room sofa, upon which
she is stretched in her shadowy convalescence, while his
head rests on the pillow beside hers. 'Yes—no! go—stay!
I have no will but yours. You know that the only
reason I ever had for wishing it was that I might come
back a little less unworthy of you—with wider experience
and larger horizons. As to pleasure'—with a small disdainful
smile—'there can be no question of that! I think
that my worst enemy will own that pleasure and I have
waved farewell to each other of late.'

Prue has been lying prostrate and languid; but at his
words she draws herself up into a sitting posture, and into
her little face, not much less white than her dressing-gown,
has come a faint pink flush—the flush of a generous effort.

'And, after all, it is only a year,' she says bravely.
'How absurd to make a fuss about only a year! When
one was a child, one used to think it endless—an eternity;
but now—why, it is gone by like a flash!'[Pg 374]

'Only a year!' repeats Freddy, with a moan. 'Oh,
Prue, can you say only? How do you do it, dear? Teach
me—teach me!'

'And when it is over,' continues Prue, the colour
deepening in her thin cheeks with the pain and labour of
her sacrifice, 'and you come back, perhaps you will find
me, too, changed, and not quite for the worse. Perhaps—perhaps
if I do my best—if I try hard to educate myself
between now and then—you will find me better able to
understand your thoughts, and enter into your ideas, and
say something besides the stupid praise—which I know
has often vexed you, though you have tried not to show it—of
your poems.'

She stops exhausted, and her faint head droops on his
breast. The tears have sprung again to Freddy's eyes.
Before he can make any rejoinder, she has lifted her face,
and is again speaking.

'You say that I am to decide?' she says, in a firm tone.
'Well, then, I have decided. You are to go. I send you.
No one,' her voice breaking a little, 'can pity me if I send
you myself—can they?'

Two days later he goes. Upon the solemnity of his
last parting with his sweetheart no one intrudes; but he
prolongs his leave-taking so unreasonably that he is within
an ace of losing his train; and it is not till after many
vigorous rappings at the door, strong remonstrances, and
nervous apostrophes through the keyhole, that he at length
issues from Prue's room, livid and staggering.

'Oh, Peggy!' he says hoarsely, wringing her two hands;
'surely—surely the bitterness of death is past! Take care
of her—in God's name take care of her for me! Do you
hear?—take care of her for me!'

CHAPTER XXXVII

'Weep with me, all you that read This little story, And know, for whom a tear you shed, Death's self is sorry.'

It is Sunday. The Lapwing is ploughing her way through
a short chopping sea in the Bay of Biscay; and here at
home, at Roupell, the people are issuing in a little quiet
stream from afternoon church. They are coming out
rather later, and with rather more alacrity than usual, both
which phenomena are to be accounted for by the fact of
Mr. Evans—never churlishly loth to yield his pulpit to a
spiritual brother—having lent it to a very young deacon,
who has taken a mean advantage of this concession to
inflict fifty minutes of stammering extempore upon the
congregation.

The Vicar has sat during this visitation in an attitude of
hopeless depression, and has given out, with an intense
feeling born of the excessive appositeness of the words to
his own case, the hymn after the sermon—

'Art thou weary,art thou languid?'

Peggy sits alone in her pew, and her mind straying away
from the fledgeling curate's flounderings, she asks herself
sadly for how many more Sundays will this be so?

Mrs. Evans overtakes her as she walks down the path
after service, to tell her that she and her whole family are[Pg 376]
to set forth on the following Tuesday in pursuit of that
change for which she has been so long sighing.

'Mr. Evans is off on his own account!' cries she in
cheerful narration. 'He does not like travelling with so
large a party; it fidgets him, so he is off on his own account.
The Archdeacon wanted him to go with him to the Diocesan
Conference; but, as he justly says, what he needs to
recruit him is an entire change of ideas as well as scene.
So he is going to run over to Trouville or Deauville, or one
of those French watering-places.'

'Indeed!'

'It seems very unkind of us—I am so sorry that we are
leaving you here alone,' pursues Mrs. Evans, her elated eye
and tone giving the lie to her regretful words. 'And they
tell me that you are to lose milady too; she talks of a
month at Brighton. She does not much fancy being at the
Manor at the fall of the leaf.'

'Thank you,' replies Peggy civilly; 'but we never
mind being by ourselves.'

'Oh, I know that you do not in a general way,' returns
Mrs. Evans. 'But of course just now it is different; Prue
so far from well. I only thought—I was only afraid—in
case——'

'Oh, nothing! nothing! I was only going to say, in
case—in case she—she had a relapse.'

'And why should she have a relapse?' inquires Margaret
sharply, in an alarmed and angry voice, turning round
upon her companion.

'Why indeed!' replies the other, looking aside, and
laughing rather confusedly. 'And at all events, you have
Dr. Acton. He is so nice and attentive, and yet does not
go on paying his visits long after there is any need for
them, just to run up a bill as so many of them do.'[Pg 377]

She is interrupted in her eulogium of the parish doctor
by the appearance on the scene—both of them running at
the top of their speed, as if they more than suspected
pursuers behind them—of Lily and Franky Harborough.
They, too, being on the wing home to-morrow, have come
to bid their friend, Miss Lambton, good-bye; a ceremony
which they entirely disdain to go through either in the
churchyard or in the road, or indeed anywhere but under
her own roof.

'Well, then, if you come you must be very quiet; you
must make no noise,' she has said warningly.

She repeats the caution when they have reached the hall
of the Red House, upon the settle of which there is no
Prue lying; for though she is so much better—oh, so much—she
has not yet been moved downstairs from the dressing-room.

'You must be very quiet,' Peggy repeats; 'you must
remember that Prue is ill!'

Franky has climbed upon her knee, and is playing with
the clasp of her Norwegian belt. He pauses from his
occupation to ask her gravely, and in a rather awed voice,
'Is she very ill? Is she going to die?'

'God forbid!' cries Peggy, starting as if she had been
stabbed. What! are they all agreed to run their knives in
their different ways into her? 'My darling, do not say
such dreadful things!'

'People do not die because they are ill,' remarks Lily,
rather contemptuously; 'you did not die!'

'No, I did not die,' echoes the little boy thoughtfully.

He sits very quietly on Margaret's lap for a while, and
when at length he climbs down, walks about the room on
ostentatious tiptoe, speaking in stage-whispers.

It is only at the moment of parting, in the eagerness
of pressing upon his friend once more for acceptance his
five-bladed knife, and self-denyingly rebutting her counter[Pg 378]
offer of the largest ferret, that he forgets himself and Prue's
invalidhood so far as to raise his little voice above the
subdued key which he has imposed upon himself.

Peggy stands leaning against the gate, watching, until
it has turned the corner out of sight, the tiny sailor-dressed
figure disappearing down the road, with its refused love-gift
reluctantly restored to the custody of its white duck
trousers-pocket, with its small shoulders shaken with its
sobs, and with its hand dragging back in petulant protest
against the relentless grasp of its nurse.

'Poor little fellow! I almost wish that I had taken his
knife,' she says regretfully.

And now they are all gone, dispersed their different
ways: milady in her brougham, the children and maids in
the omnibus, and the Evans family squeezed into, packed
all over, and bulging out of their own one-horse waggonette
and the inn fly. They are all gone—gone a week, a fortnight,
now a month ago.

At first Peggy is glad of their departure, even milady's.
What security has she but that, with all her hearty rough
kindness, with her good sound human heart, and her
plentiful kitchen physic, she may not at any moment stick
another knife into her, with some well-intended word, as
Mrs. Evans, as little Franky have already done? She
would fain see no one—no one. The fox, swishing his
brush in lazy welcome to her, and raising his russet head
to be scratched through the wires of his house, poisons their
intercourse with no insinuation that Prue is not really
better. Minky does not ask her with the terrible point-blankness
of childhood, 'Is Prue going to die?'

She will confine herself, then, to their kind and painless
company.

But as the days go by, each dwindling day with the
mark of night's little theft upon its shorn proportions; as
the wind's hand and the frost's tooth make ravine among[Pg 379]
dear summer's leaves; as the beautiful blue and green year
swoons in November's damp grasp—a change comes over
her spirit, a famine for the touch of some compassionate
hand, for the sound of some humane brave voice bidding
her be of good cheer. It is a forlorn and rainy autumn.
As in the days of St. Paul's shipwreck, so in those of
Peggy's, 'neither sun nor stars in many days appeared.'
When the rain-sheets are not soaking the saturated ground,
the thick, dull blue mists reign everywhere. They have
left their legitimate distant province, and have advanced
even to the very walls of the Red House, swaddling the
laurels and the naked lilacs, and the China roses that offer
the delicate pertinacity of their blossoms to the autumn
blast.

The garden has not yet been done up for the winter, as
Jacob is waiting until 'they dratted leaves' are all down;
and the rows of frost-blackened dahlias looming through
the fog, the tattered garlands of canariensis, the scentless
ragged mignonette, seem to Margaret's fancy, inflamed and
heightened by grief and sleeplessness—for she seldom now
has an unbroken night—to be the grinning skeletons of her
former harmless joys.

The park is a fog-swathed swamp, here and there quite
under water. Once or twice when she has passed by the
Manor, its shuttered windows have appeared to scowl
sullenly at her. Even the silence of the Vicarage seems
hostile, as does the shut gate, upon which no pea-shooting
boys or long-legged down-at-heel girls are swinging and
shouting.

To the village, usually so often haunted by her charitable
feet, she scarcely ever now goes. She dares not enter
the cottages, because she knows what their inmates will say
to her. It is no longer only Jacob's 'missis' to whom the
rapidity with which Miss Prue is going downhill is matter of
outspoken compassionate wonder. They mean no unkind[Pg 380]ness.
They do as they would be done by. How many
times has Peggy heard them calmly discussing in the very
presence of their dying, the probability or improbability of
their holding out until Christmas, or Candlemas, or Whitsun,
as the case may be! But the first time that a kind-hearted
cottage wife suggests to her, as in like case she would wish
to have it suggested to herself, 'What a sad thing it is to
think that poor Miss Prue will never see the primroses
again, she as was allers so fond of flowers!' Peggy has
stumbled away, half-stunned, as if some great and crushing
weight had fallen on her head. And this Prue, about whom
her village friends are making such sad prophecies, how is
it with her? If you had asked her, she would have said,
'Well, very well, excellently well!'

Every day for the last month she has been going to be
moved down next day to her settle in the hall; but whenever
the new morning has come, that move has been
deferred to the next. 'There is nothing the matter with
her, really nothing; only she does not feel quite up to it;
and, after all, there is plenty of time for her to get well in.
Twenty-four hours will not make much difference, and she
is so happy and comfortable up here.'

Up here, lying on the dressing-room sofa, with the fire
flickering on the hearth beside her, talking to her cheerfully
through her bad nights and her drowsy days; with every
little present given her by Freddy ranged round her, within
easy reach of her eye and hand, like a sick child's toys,
and with his letters—they are not very many, for he is
but a poor correspondent, though he says such beautiful
things when he does write—kept delicately blue-ribboned
in a little packet under her pillow, or oftener still held in
her hot dry hand.

Their number has lately been swelled by the addition of
a bulky one from Southampton, over which she has rained
torrents of blissful tears. Hanging on the wall opposite to[Pg 381]
her, so that her look may rest continually upon it, is a large
card, upon which she has had the number of the days of
her lover's intended absence marked in black strokes. Every
morning at her waking she has it brought to her, in order
to put a pen-line through one more day. There are over
thirty already thus scored out, as she shows to Peggy with
a radiant smile.

At the beginning of the month, her sofa had been always
covered with books. Freddy's own poems—these indeed
stay to the last; the 'Browning' he has retrieved for her
from Miss Hartley; books of criticism, of history, of verse,
over which she pores laboriously, in pursuance of her promise
to him to be more able to enter into his thoughts and understand
his ideas upon his return. But by and by she has
to cease from the attempt.

'I am afraid I cannot quite manage it,' she says to her
sister, with an apologetic intonation; 'my head does not
seem very clear. Sometimes I am afraid'—the wistful
tears stealing into her blue eyes—'that it is not in me;
that when he comes back he will find me just where he
left me; that he will have to put up with me as I am.'

She does not suffer much actual pain, only her nights
are increasingly broken, and her cough teases her sadly,
which only makes her say that she is quite glad Freddy is
not here, as a cough always fidgets him so. One morning
in early November, after a night of more than usually
wakeful unrest on the part of her sister, Peggy, who has
had a bed made for herself on a sofa at the foot of the sick
girl's, and has been up and down with her all night, is
standing at the open hall door, trying to get a little freshness
into eyes and brain. Her eyes are stiff with watching,
and her brain feels thick and woolly, so thick and woolly
that you would have thought it incapable of framing a
definite idea. And yet across it there comes shooting now
and again with steely clearness a torturing question—a[Pg 382]
question that is dressed sometimes in her own words, sometimes
in Freddy's childish lisp, sometimes in the villagers'
rough Doric; but that, however dressed, is yet always,
always the same.

She has mechanically picked up the morning paper, and
her languid eye is wandering carelessly over the daily
prosaic list of the born, the wed, and the departed. As
well that as anything else, though even as she makes the
apathetic reflection, the question darts again in a new and
hideous guise before her mind: 'How long will it be before
there is another entry among these?'

With a great dry sob, she is in the act of dashing down
the journal, when her glance is arrested by the letters of
a familiar name, Harborough. It seems that there is a
Harborough dead. Can it be that Betty has gone to her
account? or that her complaisant husband has carried his
complaisance so far as to take himself out of the world,
and leave the field clear for that other? She has time to
taste the full bitterness of this new thought, in the half
second before her eye has mastered the advertisement:

'On the 3d inst., at Harborough Castle, ——shire, after a few
days' illness, Francis Hugh de Vere Deloraine, only son of Ralph
Harborough, Esq., aged 6 years.'

Even now that she has read it, she does not at once
understand who it is that is dead. The string of high-sounding
unfamiliar names sets her at fault. 'Francis
Hugh de Vere Deloraine.' Is it—can it be Franky that is
dead? Can it be that neither father nor mother have
trodden the universal road, but that it is the little blooming
child who has led the way? Why, it is impossible! There
must be some mistake. It was only yesterday, as it were,
that he was here; that she saw him passing through that
very gate. In the confusion of her ideas, she has hurried
out along the damp drive to the entrance-gate, and, standing
there, gazes irrationally down the road, as if she expected[Pg 383]
once again to see the tiny sturdiness of the sailor figure,
the tear-washed roses of the little face turned back over its
shoulder in such fond and pouting protest at having to
leave her; but the mist-bound road is empty—empty, save
of its mire and of its rotting leaves. 'Franky dead!
Little Franky dead!' She says it out loud, as if the idea
could gain entrance into her brain more easily by her ears;
and then she leans her forehead against the damp gate-post,
and bursts out crying.

'I wish that I had given him another kiss! I wish that
I had gone to the turn of the road with him, as he asked
me! I wish that I had taken his knife!'

Her tears seem to make her intelligence clearer, to
render sharper her power of suffering.

'Is there no one to be left alive? Is Death to have it
all his own way?'

Her dimmed eyes rest on a drift of leaves blown by the
last blusterous wind against the hedge-bank outside; a
discoloured pile—the yellow poplar leaf, the black-brown
pear and the bronzed beech, the ribbed hazel and the
smooth lime—one fate has overtaken them all. Dead—dead!

At her foot is an elm-leaf half-dragged underground by
the dark industry of some blind earthworm. Underground—underground!
That is the bourne of us all; of the
young green leaf, aloft two months ago on the tree-top,
visited by the voyaging birds and the gamesome airs, as of
the little bounding joyous child.

The searching vapour has penetrated her clothes, and
made her shiver with cold; but she dares not yet go indoors
again, dares not yet face her sick Prue, with those sudden
tidings written on her face.

She retraces her steps along the drive, and turns into
the garden—the empty garden; empty to-day of even
Jacob's presence, as he is kept at home by his rheumatism.[Pg 384]
It is profoundly silent. The fog has got even into the
robin's throat. It is profoundly silent; and yet to Peggy,
the air is full of voices—the voices of her dead, her lost,
and her dying. Her mother, Talbot, Prue, and now little
Franky. He was not much to her, perhaps you may say;
and yet she can ill spare his little drop of love out of her
empty cup. Along the walks they hurry to meet her, and yet,
as they come up to her, they pass her by with averted faces.

'I am certainly very lonely,' she says to herself, with
a sort of astonishment; 'it is a very unusual case. There
has happened to me what happens commonly to people
only at eighty: I have outlived everything! I was given
very few people to love, to begin with; but I did love
them well. I gave them my very best. Oh, you cannot
say, any of you, that I did not give you my very best, and
yet not one of you will stay with me. Not one of you.
God—God! What have I done to be picked out of all the
world for such a fate? Is it fair? Is it fair?'

Her voice goes wailing out into the mist; but the dying
world around her has no answer to give to her riddle. It
is awaiting that to its own. She has thrown herself down
on the seat under her hawthorn bower, and from its dull
berries and sharp thorns, and few still-clinging yellow
leaves, the cold drops drip on her bare head, mix with the
scalding drops on her cheeks; but she feels them not as
she lies there, huddled up, collapsed, and despairing. Not
for long, however. By and by her soul, as is the way with
souls habitually brave, puts on its courage again. She
raises herself, and lifts her drowned and weary eyes, as if
through the fogs and exhalations they would pierce to Him
who, as all the world once thought, as many still hold to
be a truth far dearer than life, sits in judgment and mercy
beyond them.

'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' she says
solemnly. 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'

CHAPTER XXXVIII

'I am not mad,—I would to heaven I were! For then 'tis like I should forget myself: Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget! Preach some philosophy to make me mad, And thou shalt be canonised, cardinal; For, being not mad, but sensible of grief, My reasonable part produces reason How I may be deliver'd of these woes, And teaches me to kill or hang myself: If I were mad, I should forget my son; Or madly think a babe of clouts were he. I am not mad; too well, too well I feel The different plague of each calamity.'

In the days that follow, the death of Franky Harborough,
which at an ordinary time would have been the sorrowful
main occupation of Peggy's thoughts, has to retire into the
background of her mind. In the foreground there is room
for but one absorbing topic. Prue is decidedly worse. In
an illness such as hers—which is less a definite disease than
a decline all round, a bowing to its final ruin of a building
whose foundations have been sapped for more than a year—there
is very often, for a considerable period, but little
change to be noted from day to day; and then suddenly—no,
not suddenly—in a progression rather, as natural as
that from seedtime to harvest, on some morning, at some
noon or night, there is a step down to a lower level of
vitality; a travelling along that lower level, until the time
for a new and farther descent. It would seem impossible[Pg 386]
that any breath of the chilly fog outside could have thrust
its pestilent way into the atmosphere, regulated with so
passionate a nicety, of Prue's room; and, indeed, there is
no sign of any return of that bronchitis which had been the
ostensible beginning of her illness. Nor is there any very
perceptible aggravation of any one of her symptoms.

The signs of her approaching dissolution are rather
negative than positive. It is only that Miss Prue is going
downhill rather quicker than before—that is all. There is
now no longer any question of the oak settle in the hall.
Even the sofa in the dressing-room has been abandoned.
Prue no longer stirs from her bed; but she lies there quite
happily, quite as happy as she was before; for Freddy's
gifts are within as easy reach of her hand, spread on the
counterpane before her, as they were on the table in the
adjoining room; and her card with its 365 black strokes
hangs quite as full in her eye, on the wall opposite her
bed.

However bad her night may have been, there is always
something to look forward to at dawning, in having it
brought to her to put her triumphant pen through another
day.

'I shall be glad when we have got up to forty,' she says
to Peggy, with a faint but cheerful laugh. 'I shall feel
quite differently when we have reached forty: there will be
all but a ninth of the time gone then.'

It is a day on which the officious dusk of the winter
afternoon—always in such haste to shoulder away its pale
brother—has already settled down. For sixteen long hours
there will be no more glint of light. This dreary thought
is passing through Peggy's mind, as she nods drowsily over
the fire. She is roused from it and from her semi-sleep by
hearing the room-door open cautiously and seeing Sarah
making signs—evidently not intended to be seen by Prue—through
the aperture.[Pg 387]

In obedience to them, Margaret rises languidly, and goes
out upon the landing.

'What is it?'

'If you please, 'm, there's a lady wishes to speak to you.'

'Oh, Sarah, you know that I can't see any one; why did
not you tell her so?'

'I did tell her so, 'm, but she would not take "No"; she
says if she stays all night she must see you.'

'What does she mean?' cries Peggy, in a voice of
astonished indignation; 'who can she be? Who is she?'

'Well, 'm, I really did not recognise her until she spoke—dressed
in deep mourning and that; and she asked me
not to mention her name. She said she was sure you would
not see her if I did.'

Dressed in deep mourning! Peggy's legs have been somewhat
shaky under her of late, through long standing upon
them. Perhaps that is why she now catches at the banisters.
It has flashed upon her who her visitor is. What has
brought her hither? Why has she come? Has she gone
mad?

'Go and sit with Miss Prue, while I am away,' she says
to the servant; and so walks slowly downstairs. Outside
the door of the hall she pauses a moment to pull herself together.
She is trembling violently, and her teeth chatter.

What has brought her here? What can they have to
say to each other? She enters. Beside the table is standing
Lady Betty Harborough; for it is she who is Peggy's
visitor. The lamp is lit, and burns brightly, though nowadays
there is never any one to read or work by its gentle
glow. A flourishing fire sings on the hearth; but their
joint cheerfulness serves only to throw up into higher
relief the inky gloom of the figure they illuminate. She
makes no movement to go to meet Peggy, but awaits her
coming; and for a moment the two women look at each
other in silence.[Pg 388]

As they do so, a doubt—a real, serious doubt flashes
across Peggy's mind, as to whether this is Lady Betty.
Coupled with the doubt comes a darted recollection of the
two last occasions on which she has seen her; the very last
of all, sitting under a date-palm in the Hartleys' conservatory,
in the full flush of her décolleté beauty and impudent
folly, out of sheer love of mischief, turning the head
of a foolish parish priest; and the time before—oh! that
time before—when her own heart had lain down and died,
on that star-strewn night, when through the gate of the
walled garden she had seen her with her arms laced about
John Talbot's neck.

There is no veil to disguise the ruin of Lady Betty's face.
Under her heavy crape bonnet, her hair, uncurled by the
damp of the winter night, hangs in pitiful little tags upon
her sunk forehead. There is no trace of rouge on her
pinched cheeks; nor any vestige of black, save that painted
there by agonised vigils, under her hopeless eyes. Her
mouth—that mobile mouth so seldom seen at rest, always
either curved into a smile, or formed into a red pout, or
playing some pretty antic or other—is set like a flint, and
around it are drawn lines deeper and more, many more,
than those cut by old age's chisel. Can it be this forlorn
and God-struck creature that she, Peggy, has been hating
so long and so well? Beneath this dual consciousness—the
same consciousness under which Talbot had confusedly
laboured once before—beneath the waning influence of
that old hostility, and this new and immeasurable compassion,
Peggy finds it impossible to speak. But her visitor
saves her the trouble.

'I must apologise for intruding upon you at such a time.
I know that I have no right to do so; I should not have
taken such a liberty, only that—that I had a message to
give you—a commission from a—a person who is dead.'

Her voice is perfectly clear and collected, without a[Pg 389]
quiver in it. It is only by the slight hesitation before a
word here and there that it could be conjectured that it
was not a matter of perfect indifference to her of which she
is speaking. There is such a lump rising in Peggy's throat,
that she could not answer if she were to gain a kingdom
by it.

'Perhaps you are aware,' continues the other, quite as
collectedly as before, 'that I have lost my son. He died,
after a few days' illness, on the 3d; and when he was
dying, he was very anxious that you should have this,'
holding out to Margaret, in a hand that does not shake,
the knife that had been so eagerly urged upon her acceptance
by poor little Franky on his last visit to her. 'He
wished me to tell you that it has five blades; and that
though there is a little notch out of one of them, it does
not cut the worse for that.'

Peggy has taken the knife, and is covering it with sad
and reverent kisses.

'God bless him!' she says brokenly. 'God in heaven
bless him!'

The tears are raining in a torrent down the face of
Franky's friend; but his mother's eyes are dry.

'Not long before he died,' she resumes, in that awful
collected voice, 'he asked me to give it into your hands;
that must be my excuse to-night. I believe you refused it
once before. I told him that I thought you would not
refuse it now. He begged you to keep it. He said he
should not want it any more; it was quite true,' her eye
wandering round the room, and speaking as if to herself, as
if having forgotten Peggy's presence—'he will never want
anything any more!'

Peggy has lifted her swimming eyes upwards.

'They are in God's hands, and no evil shall touch them!'
she says solemnly.

It is not only the little innocent who has already crossed[Pg 390]
the flood of whom she is thinking, but also of that other
one in the room upstairs, whose feet are so fast nearing the
ford.

'He was very fond of you, very!' says the mother, her
parched eyes noting with an expression of surprise and
envy the agitation of her companion. 'And he was not
one to take a fancy to everybody either; he had his likes
and dislikes. Yes, he was very fond of you; but,' with a
sort of hurry in her tone, 'you did not come before me; no
one did that. Mammy was always first. Last time he was
staying at the Manor he wrote me two little letters; how
do you think he signed them?' with a pale, wild smile:
'"Your loving friend." Was not that an odd signature?
"Your loving friend!"'

Peggy's sobs have mastered her so completely, that she
can make no answer beyond that of once again convulsively
pressing her poor little legacy to her quivering lips.

'He suffered a good deal,' continues Betty, with that
terrible composure of hers; 'but he made no fuss about it.
He asked me once or twice whether I could not take away
the pain; but when I told him that I could not, he quite
understood. Children are so patient; and he always was
a plucky little chap.'

'You poor woman!' cries Peggy, in a voice almost unintelligible
through her tears. 'Oh, I wish I could do anything
for you! Oh, you poor woman!'

She has caught both Betty's icy hands into her own
warm compassionate clasp. She has clean forgotten that
they are the hands of the woman who has slain her life.
She knows only that there is a most miserable creature
struggling in the deep waters beside her, to whom all her
large pitying heart goes out. The other accepts indifferently
that strong and sorrowful clasp, as what would
not she so accept?

'You seem to be very kind!' she says, with a sort of[Pg 391]
stupid wonder. 'And yet, if you come to think of it, we
have no great cause to love each other; you have no great
cause to be fond of me.'

'You poor soul!' returns Peggy, looking back, with all
the perfect honesty of her sad eyes, into the other's disfigured
face. 'I bear you no malice for any harm you may
have done me; and I have never wittingly done you any.'

'Never wittingly done me any!' repeats Betty, with a dull
and dragging intonation. 'Have not you? There were
only two things in the world that I cared about. You
took one of them from me, and now God has taken the
other.'

Peggy lets go her hands in a revulsion of feeling strong
beyond the power of words to express, and steps back a
horrified pace or two. Is it possible, is it conceivable that
in this most sacred hour of holy mother-grief, she can think
or speak of her own lawless passion?

'You are shocked!' says Betty, perceiving this movement
on the part of her companion. 'I do not know why you
should be. If I were to pretend that I had always been a
good woman, it would not give me back my boy; and what
does anything else matter?'

Then there is silence for a minute or two. It is broken
by Betty.

'When you had taken him from me, why did you send
him away again?' she asks abruptly.

For a moment it seems as if all the blood in Peggy's
body had sprung to her brain, and was hammering at her
temples, and dinning in her ears in a surge of passionate
indignation. But at sight of the stricken face before her,
her anger dies down again.

'I could not say anything harsh to you to-night,' she
replies gently; 'but you must know that you are the last
person who has any right to ask that question.'

'I know it,' replies Betty, with a stony indifference;[Pg 392]
'any right, or any need either, since I know the answer.
Do not I know that you were in the walled garden on that
night last June? Did not I see you as I ran past? I
knew what you would think, and I knew, too, that I could
trust to him not to undeceive you.'

Peggy is trembling like a leaf. Must she bear it? Does
Christian charity command her to endure this ruthless,
purposeless tearing open of her scarcely cicatrised wound?

'There was no question of undeceiving,' she says
brokenly, yet with dignity. 'I did not trust to hearsay—I
should not have been likely to do that; but I could not
distrust the evidence of my own eyes.'

Betty's sunken look is fixed on the girl's quivering
features.

'It was a pity for your own peace of mind,' she says
slowly, 'that you did not come a moment earlier, or stay a
moment or two later! You would have seen then how
much the evidence of your own eyes was worth. It would
have saved you a good deal of pain; for I suppose you
have taken it to heart—you look as if you had. I thought
that you looked as if you had when I saw you at the
Hartleys' party the other night. The other night'—putting
up her hand to her head with a confused look—'was it the
other night! or a year ago? or when?'

Margaret's heart has begun to beat so suffocatingly fast
that she can hardly draw her breath. What is Betty
saying? What is she implying? Is it—is it——

'I suppose,' continues Lady Betty, in the same level,
even, absolutely colourless voice as before, 'that you
thought we met by appointment? Poor man!' with a
catch that is almost like the echo of a ghost's laugh in her
voice; 'if you had seen his face when he first caught sight
of me, I think you would have exonerated him from that
accusation. What do you suppose that he was doing when
I came upon him? Why, kissing the spot of ground that[Pg 393]
he fancied your feet might have touched! I suppose that
that was what sent me mad! There was a time, you know,
when he used to kiss the print of my feet. Yes, I suppose
it was that, though it seems odd now. If I had known
how differently things would look from the other side of
my Franky's grave, how little I should have cared!'

The oppression on Margaret's breathing is heavier than
ever—the thundering of her heart more deafening; but she
must master them—she must speak.

'But I saw!' she cries, gasping; 'I saw!'

'You saw my arms round his neck,' returns the other,
in that terrible level voice of hers, out of which despair
seems to have pressed all modulation, not a shade of colour
tinging her livid face as she makes the admission. 'I know
that you did. Do you wonder that I can own it? If you
only knew of how infinitely little consequence it seems to
me now, you would not wonder. Yes, you saw my arms
round his neck; but do you suppose that it was by his will
or consent that they were there? Poor man!' with the
same ghastly spectre of a laugh as before; 'if he is as
innocent of all other crimes at the Day of Reckoning as he
is of that, he will come off easily indeed.'

Is Peggy's breath going to stop altogether? Is her heart
resolved to break altogether out of its prison in the agony
of its springing? She presses her clenched hand hard upon
it. It must let her listen. It must not—must not burst in
two until she has heard—heard to the end.

'I wish you to understand,' goes on Betty, relentlessly
pursuing her confession, 'that it was I—I—who forced my
last good-bye against his will—oh, most against his will—upon
him! I knew that it was good-bye; he had not left
me much doubt upon that head. I knew that his one wish
was to be rid of me—to hear no more of me—to have done
with me for this and all other worlds; and so, as I tell you,
I thrust my last good-bye upon him, and you saw it, and[Pg 394]
misunderstood, as how should not you? I do not know
whether you will believe me—it matters little to me
whether you do or not.'

Her hopeless voice dies away on the air, and her sunk
look wanders aimlessly round the room. Peggy is reeling
as she stands. Is it the fog from outside which has come
in and is misting her eyes? She puts up her hand stupidly
to them, as if to wipe it away.

'I—I—I—am sure you are speaking truth,' she says, in
an almost unintelligible broken whisper; 'but as yet—as
yet—I—I—cannot take it in.'

'I would be quick about it if I were you,' answers the
other stonily. 'I would not waste any more time. You
have wasted five months already; and we are none of us
allowed much time to enjoy ourselves in. We none of us
keep our good things long. Any one would have thought
that I might have kept my Franky a little, would not they?
He was only six. Did you know that he was only six?
Many people took him for seven; he was so big for his age.
What, crying again? Well, I do not much wonder; he
was a very loving little fellow, was not he? and had a great
fancy for you. He prized that knife almost more than
anything he possessed, and yet he was determined that
you should have it. You will take care of it, will not you?
Good-bye!'

CHAPTER XXXIX

'Part of the host have crossed the flood,And part are crossing now.'

She is gone—passed out into the blackness of the winter
evening—gone before Peggy, paralysed, half-stunned as she
is, can arrest her. Was she ever here? The doubt flashes
into the girl's mind. Of late, in her long vigils, she has
seemed to be parted from the spirit-world by but the consistency
of a spider's web. Has that fine partition been
broken down? Has she been seeing visions, and dreaming
dreams? Did that crape-gowned figure ever stand really
in the body beside the table? Did she herself ever look
across the lamplight into the still and bottomless despair
of its eyes? Did it really give her Franky's knife, and tell
her—oh no, it is incredible! God can never have granted
to her—to her of all people, sunk so low as she is, far beyond
the reach of any joy to touch—to hear such things as her
ears seem to have heard. She looks wildly round the
room.

'It was not true!' she says out loud; 'it was hallucination.
It comes of sleeping so little.'

And yet it must be true, too; for here, clasped in her
hand, is the poor knife, the object of the mother's journey.
If that be real, then must all the rest be real too. As the
splendour of this inference breaks in dazzling overpowering
light upon her soul, she sinks on her knees beside the table,
lays down her head upon it at the same spot where Talbot[Pg 396]
had laid his head in his heart-break five months ago, while
she had stood over him pronouncing her unjust and inexorable
sentence.

'Oh, love, love!' she sighs out; 'dear love! poor love!
forgive me! come back to me! how could I tell?'

And then she lifts her face up to him, as if he were
there; her face irradiated with a joy like that of morning.
Yes, though Prue is dying upstairs, though Franky's
pathetic bequest is still held between her fingers, her heart
is leaping. Has not one of her dead been given back to her?
Why, then, shall they not all? In that moment of supreme
elation, it seems to her as if all things were possible; it
seems to her as if Prue must get well, as if all her other
dead joys must come crowding back to welcome that exceeding
great one, that has flown to her with widespread arms
out of the night of winter and despair. Prue will get well.
God will make her well. With God all things are possible.
There is a smile of wet radiance on her pale lips, and in her
tired eyes; and she is repeating over and over again to herself,
as if by repetition she would ensure their fulfilment,
these lovely promises, when the door opens and Sarah looks in.

'If you please, 'm, could you come back to Miss Prue?'

'Oh yes, this minute—this minute! How has she been?
how is she? Better? a little better?'

There must be something strange about her own appearance,
for her servant is looking at her in undisguised
amazement.

'Better, 'm?' she repeats in a wondering key; 'whatever
should make you think she was better? She has had
a bad bout of coughing since you left, and it has tired her
out, so that it quite frightened me. That was partly why
I came for you.'

Before her sentence is ended Peggy is upstairs again
and at her sister's bedside; the transfiguration all dead out
of her face.[Pg 397]

'You have been a long time away,' says the sick girl
feebly, and with a little of her old querulousness; 'why did
you go?'

'I will not go again, darling.'

'But why did you go?' repeats the other with the pertinacity
of sickness; 'where have you been?'

Margaret hesitates a moment; then:

'I have been with Franky Harborough's mother,' she
answers gently, the tears rushing afresh to her eyes, as she
holds out the legacy of the dead child before the faint eyes
of the dying one; 'he sent me his knife; his mother
brought it me.'

'Poor Franky!' says Prue softly, but she does not
manifest any curiosity. She only turns her wan face upon
the pillow, and closes her eyes. In the watches of the
night, however, she recurs more than once to the subject,
waking up to cry, 'Poor Franky!' and to say, 'How sad
it is when young people die!'

And Peggy acquiesces.

The tired servants have gone to bed. They, too, have
had their share of watching on former nights. Peggy
keeps her vigil alone. In the intense silence of the dark,
in the intense silence of the little lonely country house
standing fog-muffled through the enormous November
night, beside its unfrequented country road, she keeps her
vigil alone. Not even an owl calls from the tree-tops, nor
does a star look through the murk. In her night-watching
of late she has been tormented with a cruel over-mastering
drowsiness, which has filled her with a remorse such as
those must have felt to whom it was said, 'What, could
ye not watch with Me one hour?' but against which
offended nature, being yet stronger than she, she has once
and again contended in vain.

To-night, however, through all the hours of her vigil,
she is broadly, acutely awake. Awake! Yes; but is she[Pg 398]
sane? That is the question that over and over again she
puts to herself. If she be, what are these voices that keep
calling to her out of the noisy silence? What are these
faces that are becking and mowing at her? What are
these flashes of light, dreader than any darkness—flashes
that have the blasphemy to look like joy—that dart now
and again across the sorrow-struck confusion of her soul?
How dare they come? God-sent, or devil-sent; messengers
from heaven, or fiends from hell, how dare they come?
They shall not, shall not thrust themselves between her and
her Prue.

When the tarrying dawn comes, it finds her almost as
exhausted as it does her whose stock of mornings and
evenings has so nigh run out. It has come, that tarrying
dawn; and Prue, waking up with a start, as by some
infallible instinct she always does as soon as the east has
sent her first weak arrows against the great target of the
dark, feebly calls to her sister to bring her her card that
she may erase the one more parted day from the calendar.
But when Peggy's strong and tender arms have propped
her up, when Peggy's fond hand has put the pen into hers
it escapes from her disobedient fingers.

'I do not know what has come to me,' she says with her
little smile; 'but you must do it for me—that will be just
as well, will not it? You do not think,' with an anxious
catch in her voice, 'that it is ill-luck your doing it this
once, instead of me? If you think so, I will try again.'

As morning advances there comes a slight renewal
of strength—a slight revival to the dying girl. The
servants and the doctor—the kind doctor who still makes
a feint of prescribing—urge upon Margaret to take advantage
of this slight amendment to snatch an hour or two
of sleep; but she pushes away their advice almost rudely.
Is not the text still ringing in her ears, 'What, could ye
not watch with Me one hour?' And Prue, as it turns out,[Pg 399]
needs her more to-day than most days. For she is less
drowsy and lethargic than she has been of late, able even
to plan a new arrangement of all Freddy's presents, a new
grouping round her of his photographs.

'Had ever any one so many portraits of the same person?'
she says with a tiny white smile, looking contentedly
at them, when the new arrangement has been effected. 'I
am very silly about him; but he is silly about me too, is
not he?' with a look of intensely wistful asking in her
blue eyes.

When evening draws on, she begins to grow heavy
again.

When evening draws on! Can it be again approaching?
already again approaching—the grisly nightmare night?
Why, it seems as if not more than half an hour had elapsed
since day had begun to deal out her avaricious dole of
light! and now she is again withdrawing it. The night is
approaching. The night has approached. The night is
here, in dominant black supremacy. And again Peggy
watches. It is not the fault of the servants that she does
so. At any crisis—a sickness, a catastrophe, a death—servants
are almost always kind; and Margaret's are more
than willing to shorten or forego their rest in order to
share with her, or replace her in her vigil. But she dismisses
their offers promptly, yet with a resolution that
shows that it would be vain to press them. She will call
them if there is any need. They go reluctantly, and once
again night settles down upon the sad little Red House.

The drowsiness that used to frighten Margaret with its
threatened mastery she has no longer any need to keep at
bay. On the contrary, the preternatural wakefulness which
had been with her all last night is with her still. With
her, too, is the thundering silence, beating in her ear like a
loud drum. All her last night's enemies are here again—all
but one, the worst. She has no longer to contend with[Pg 400]
those flashes of dreadful incongruous joy. They at least
are gone—extinct, dead! He that had called them forth
is massed in her despair with her other dead. They are
all gone irrevocably. The only difference is that God took
the others, and she herself has thrown him away. But
they are all equally gone—gone! If it were not so, if she
had any one left, would she be kneeling here, in this
overpowering loneliness, watching Prue go, and asking
God over and over again, in the same stupid agonised
words, to let her go easily?

Yes, it has come to this. We begin by asking such
great things for our beloved—honour, and wisdom, and
long life, and riches; and we end in this, 'Give them a
short agony, an easy passing!' Is it a sign that God
has heard her prayer, that as the hours go by Prue begins
to talk out loud, with little laughs between? to talk—not
of her cough, and her physic, and her short breath—but of
gay and lovely things. She is talking to one who is not
here, of fair sights that are not before her dying eyes.

Peggy holds her breath to listen. She is sitting in the
garden with Freddy. She is riding with him through the
woods. From what she says, it must be springtime. What
a sheet of harebells! Never any May that she remembers
have they been so many before! And the birds! how
loudly they are singing! She would like to know the note
of each, but she is so stupid, he must teach her!

A great dry sob breaks from the listener's breast.

'Oh, Prue, Prue!' she moans; 'take me with you!
Let me, too, see the flowers and hear the birds!'

But Prue does not heed. She babbles happily on. By
and by her wanderings die down into a sort of semi-stupor,
that is neither sleep nor waking. The silence that her
voice had broken is not again wholly restored. It is exchanged
for those indefinite noises of the night which, to
timid souls, seem to share the dominion of terror with its[Pg 401]
stillness. There are definite noises too. A mouse gnaws
behind the wainscot; the wind has risen, not into a loud
and roaring storm, but into a plaintive piping and muttering
and whistling. A loose rose-branch that in summer
sends its petals flying in through Prue's casement to her
feet, is now tapping pertinaciously on the pane. It seems
as if it would not take 'No' for answer, as if it were crying
to her with summoning fingers, 'Come, come! it is time!'

The night has reached the dreariest of her little hours,
that one that seems equally remote from the comfortable
shores of the gone day and the coming one. The clocks
have just struck two, and Peggy kneels on, still reiterating
that monotonous prayer that God will take her Prue gently.
To her ears, though not to her senses, come the noises of
the night; come also noises that do not rightly belong to
the province of the night, that are rather akin to the noises of
the day: the sound, for instance, of wheels outside upon the
lonely road, a sound that does not die away, gradually
muffled and fading into the distance, but that ceases
suddenly on the air—ceases, only to be succeeded by the
noise of a vague, subdued stir in the house itself. But
Peggy kneels on. The only noise that she heeds is that of
the beckoning rose-branch that calls continually, 'Come,
come!'

She has buried her face in the bed-clothes, praying
always; and as she lifts it again she becomes aware that in
the doorway, left ajar to give Prue more air and ease in
breathing, some one is standing, some one standing at the
dead of the night, looking in upon her. But still she kneels
on. She is quite past fear. Is she wandering, like Prue?
Is it some heavenly messenger that has come out of pure
pity to her help? If it be so, it wears the homely human
form, the form of one with whom she once sat under a
hawthorn bower, with her happy head upon his breast.

As her solemn, haggard eyes meet his, he advances into[Pg 402]
the room, and kneels down beside her. They exchange no
word. Their hands meet in no greeting; only they kneel
side by side, until the morning. And at morning, when
the first dawn-streak makes gray the chinks of the window-shutters,
Prue, true to her infallible instinct, wakes up out
of her trance; and, opening her eyes, cries with a loud, clear
voice:

'Is it morning? Then there is another day gone. Forty
days gone—forty days!' and so, lifting her face to Peggy
to be kissed, as she has done all her life, before addressing
herself to sleep, she closes her eyes, and turns her face on
the pillow with a satisfied sigh; and on that satisfied sigh
her soul slips away.

Speak softly, for Prue is asleep—asleep as Franky
Harborough sleeps, as all they sleep, the time of whose
waking is the secret of the Lord God Omnipotent.

Her little world have long prophesied that Prue would
die, and now she is dead—dead, and, restless as she was,
laid to rest in her moss-lined grave. With the live green
moss environing her, with the bride-white flowers enwrapping
her from dreamless head to foot, she has gone—gone
from sofa and settle and garden—gone soon from everywhere,
save from Peggy's heart. And he who is the alone lord and
owner of that great heart does not grudge its place to the
poor little figure seated for ever by that warm fireside; and
if, as time goes on, he knows that the Prue so perennially
enthroned there—the Prue of whom in after-days Peggy's
children are taught to talk with lowered voices, as of some
thing too sweet and sacred for common speech—is not the
real Prue who fretted and repined, and loved to madness
here on earth, he does not own it even to himself.

Postscript.—About six months after the death of Prue
Lambton, the attention of the readers of one of the graver[Pg 403]
monthlies was arrested by the appearance in its pages of a
short ode, the melody of whose versification, the delicate
aroma of its fancy, the quaint beauty of its imagery, and
the truth and freshness of its feeling, called to their minds
the best of the Elizabethan lyrics. It was anonymous, and
was addressed 'To Prue in Heaven.'